


A Hope in Hell

by joudama



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, The King and the Clown
Genre: Community: no_true_pair, Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2010-07-19
Updated: 2010-07-19
Packaged: 2017-10-10 16:12:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 27,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/101633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joudama/pseuds/joudama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hope is a hard thing to come by, in both war and 'peace.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> If you've never seen The King and the Clown...oh, god, I'm so sorry because you're missing out on an amazing movie. You don't need to have seen the movie for this--this takes place after the movie and is from Angeal's point of view, and he has no idea what happened during it--but oh, do see the movie. It's my favorite movie, no contest. (If you haven't read it, I'd recommend reading this on my lj, ij, or dreamwidth accounts, since I have helpful images of everyone from King and the Clown there.)
> 
> This is slightly spoiler, since it takes place after the end of the movie. The movie...does not have a happy ending, but that's practically a given, seeing as its an Asian period drama, and those never end well. I've moved the movie from Korea to Wutai, specifically Daerimmun (「大林門」 a city I've used a lot in my Wutai war fic) in Chochung (the 'Korea' area of Wutai--「朝中」), and changed the king to a Wutai warlord who styled himself a king, and the hordes of attacking soldiers were instead ShinRa troops. After that? It's all the same, aside from me filling in some details from things that weren't in the regular movie but were things that were done by the historical King Yeonsan-gun (yes, he was a real person, and considered the worst king Korea had ever had), and using the "director's cut" edition that I have, which had extra scenes.
> 
> This prompt combo was practically a gift, yo. Which is why it's so long in total; sorry 'bout that. ^^;; (and for the length of these notes.)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When the city of Daerimmun fell, and with it the Chochung province, it was far simpler than they expected.

When the city of Daerimmun fell, and with it the Chochung province, it was far simpler than they expected. The 'king' of Chochung was, from all accounts, a despotic madman. It had been the Wutai themselves, retainers to the king, who had in desperation come to the ShinRa camps, and offered information in exchange for toppling the "Mad King of Chochung."

If the stories Angeal heard from them were true--advisers shot with arrows, his father's concubines stabbed to death--he could understand why they had come.

Angeal had been left in charge of "securing" Daerimmun as Genesis swept northeast for Taishang and Sephiroth south towards Yamato. That included the more unpleasant aspect of things--overseeing the clearing of the bodies from the castle, interrogating the people who had been swept up and detained, setting the castle up as a base and organizing operations; all of the tedious things that wore down at you because they never seemed to end.

It was the bodies that got to Angeal. There had been a lot, and that included the women and children in the palace. There were too many bodies, and decisions had to be made about what to do with them, and quickly.

The most expedient thing would be to burn them, but he hated the smell of burning flesh. They didn't quite have the manpower to spend right then to bury all of them, not with the work that went into securing the whole damned city, and that meant they would have to force Wutai into the work, and that _never_ worked out well.

Once a decision had been made, and black smoke rose into the air from the courtyard, blocking out the sun, Angeal sat down tiredly in what had once been the Mad King's chambers but were now Angeal's quarters, and wondered just what it was he was doing here.

\--

A number of people had been captured when the castle fell; most of them were locked up in the castle's jail. Most of them would have to sit there until Wutai was secured, and only the gods knew how long that would be. Some...some would not be detained long, not if they weren't cooperative in the right way.

A leader who swore loyalty to ShinRa would retain their power. One who did not was one that the people could rally around and cause problems.

It had had to be handled quietly, of course; the killing of a king--even a king only in his own mind--was a dangerous thing, and Angeal had to figure out who else it was of the upper echelons who needed to be neutralized. The King had been doomed; part of the condition reached with the advisers was that the king be removed. Perhaps they were thinking that meant exile, but as far as ShinRa was concerned, it meant death couched as a casualty of the invasion, and it mattered not at all if the king had still been alive when the castle fell--he hadn't lived long past its falling, after all. And now, it was a matter of finding out how many people had to "die during the battle for the castle" to make sure the fiction was kept.

Which is why he was in the glorified dungeons now. He'd been here all day and all of the day before, and finally was almost done--done at least with trying to figure out from the ones on the list his subordinate had given him of who would need further evaluation. There were only two people left and then finally he would be _done_.

"Sir!" the guard said when he went into the last section of the make-shift cells. They'd had to modify the prison of the castle to secure it and expand it, and the place showed the strain of the effort.

"At ease, trooper," Angeal said, smiling faintly to put the man at ease. "I'm looking now for a...a Jang, I believe." He looked around and saw a woman sitting haughtily in one cell, as if sitting on a throne and not in a dirty cell. The other makeshift cell held another woman alone, and the fact that both sat in cells _alone_ warranted a double take.

The guard had apparently taken the 'at ease' to heart and gave Angeal a smirk that he didn't like at all. "The king's boy-toy, that one," he said, and gestured over to one cell with his thumb when he saw Angeal looking in. Angeal's eyes popped open despite himself; that was a _man_? Angeal was no stranger to pretty men--he'd known Genesis his entire life, and while no one would ever say it to Sephiroth's face, Sephiroth was _pretty_\--this was something else. The man in the cell was _striking_, in the kind of way that made you doubletake just because it was hard to really believe you were seeing someone that beautiful. On second glance, it was more obvious he was a man--the width of his shoulders, his hands--but it just made him seem more incongruous and ironically enough made him seem more feminine and _fragile_, especially with the way he tried to make himself look smaller, turning his head away and inadvertently showing off the long, paleness of his neck.

He frowned suddenly. The man--was that Jang?--didn't look like he was in good shape at all. He was paler than most Wutai, and it didn't seem to be just a result of avoiding the sun. He looked washed out, bled out, almost. "Is he all right? His color looks...what happened to his wrists?" he said, frowning more as he stared at the man's wrists. The man was clutching his robes protectively, and one of his wrists were bandaged, and Angeal had a sick kind of understanding about why the man had looked bled out.

"Looks like he slit them or something. You know these damned wonks, can't take losing."

Usually, Angeal enjoyed the fact that his men felt relaxed enough around him to talk like he was a regular grunt like them.

..._Usually_.

Angeal ignored the idiot and focused on the man in the cell. "Hey, are you OK?" he said, talking directly to him.

"Oh, don't bother," the guard said, rolling his eyes. "He hasn't said a word, not even in that Wutai chocobo-gibber, this whole time."

"Has a medic looked at him?" Angeal said, giving the idiot playing at a guard a hard look because he had his limits, and the man squirmed slightly.

"I don't know, sir," he said, snapping more to strict attention.

"Oh, just let him die!" a sharp female voice said in accented Visgradian. She spat something out angrily in Wutai, obviously directed at the man, who flinched and seemed to curl in on himself.

"Oy, shut up, bi--you!" the guard said, snarling at the woman after a nervous look at Angeal.

"Watch out for that one," the woman said, ignoring the guard and giving Angeal a conspiratorial look. "He's nothing but a power hungry little prostitute. He's got ways, you see. No man you can't seduce, naa, Gong-gil!"

The man said nothing, just flinched again and bowed his head and let his hair fall in a dark curtain, blocking his face.

Angeal looked over at the woman. "Who is she?"

The woman raised her chin and sneered, haughty and imperial even in a dank holding cell. "I am Jang Nok-su," she said. "Consort to the King. Who are you?"

Angeal raised an eyebrow. "Angeal Hewley, commander of the ShinRa division in Chochung," he said flatly, and Nok-su looked taken aback. "And if you're 'Jang Nok-su, Consort to the King,' you must be the Jang I'm supposed to interrogate. Glad to know you speak Standard, because it means I won't need the interpreter. Trooper," he said suddenly, calling for the guard, "I want the both of them brought to me for questioning tomorrow. I also want the people in cells 5, 8 and 2," he finished. He had been here all day and was ready to leave and at least see the sun for a few minutes. He felt tired, and wondered if he ought to just delegate this to someone else. But no...this was too important--or rather, too _secretive_\--to be allowed to anyone else. And if he was going to be relegating these people to death for ShinRa's cause...well, he figured he owed it to them to look them in the eye before he passed judgment.

He was tired of this.

He headed out. On his way, he looked back over his shoulder. In his cell, the man--Gong-gil, was it?--had huddled against a wall, hugging himself even tighter. He was an unhealthy pale, especially in contrast with the dark walls and his dark hair. His loose sleeves had slipped down, showing his pale and bandaged wrists, so fragile that it seemed they would snap. Never in his life had he ever seen anyone who looked so alone or so broken, and Angeal felt like he had been punched in the stomach.

\--

When the SOLDIER left, Nok-su instantly was on her feet and at the front of her cell. She sneered over at where she knew Gong-gil was, even though he huddled inside and hid himself.

She laughed, and it was an ugly thing. "_Still twisting men around your little finger, eh, Gong-gil? You're amazing, not even saying a word and still getting that SOLDIER all but begging at your feet. Pretty, pretty Gong-gil, prettier than any woman...you'll always land on your feet. Or should I say on your back?_"

There was only silence from Gong-gil's cell, and Nok-su just laughed until the guard came over.

\--

It had been a long day, and it was only two-thirty.

Angeal had been at this all day, interrogating members of the king's court all morning. He'd missed lunch as well, and that never put him in a good mood. There were still several people to talk to, but it was down to only two at this point. The last two, and once he was done with them, he was going to get some dinner--it would be too late for lunch, and he'd be damned if he had to skip two meals in a row, not with what all the mako did to his system.

"Bring in the next one," he said, rubbing his temples as he gave the order. His interpreter, a young trooper named Park who'd been born in Midgar but whose parents were from Chochung, looked about as tired as he did, but had held up pretty well. Angeal would be lying if he said he hadn't had some small, niggling doubt at first about Park because he was Chochung Wutai, but he'd been proven wrong and was glad for it.

The door opened a minute later, well after Angeal had regained his composure, and one of the guards brought in a woman who looked familiar. It took Angeal a moment to place her, but as soon as the guard announced who she was--Jang Nok-su--he recalled her instantly.

"Jang Nok-su, Consort to the King," Angeal said, one eyebrow quirking up. "Please, have a seat," he said, indicating the chair across from his desk.

Her head went up. "I'll stand," she said, before the translator could say anything.

"If you want," Angeal said with a shrug. "But we're going to be here for a while, and I'd suggest you take a seat."

She sniffed once, loudly, and remained standing.

"Since you speak Standard, would you prefer to be questioned in it or through an interpreter in Chochungese?"

She sniffed again then said, "I can speak your language just fine."

"Very well, then. Park," Angeal said, looking over at his interpreter, "If you'd like to take a break, go ahead. You've been on your feet all day. I'll call you if I need you."

"...Thank you, sir," Park said, nodding once, sharply. "Sir!"

"You're dismissed," he said, and Park saluted him sharply, perfect parade style, before leaving.

Nok-su hissed something at him under her breath, and Park flinched slightly but walked out without otherwise reacting.

Angeal would be lying if he said he had completely trusted Park at first; he'd also be lying if he said Park hadn't been put through Hel's gauntlet by _both_ sides at times.

\--

It had been _too long_ of a day, and it wasn't even four o'clock.

Interrogating 'Jang Nok-su, Consort to the King' had been a nightmare. The woman was fluent in Visgradian, and Angeal'd been thankful at first, until he'd realized she was fluent enough to have a tongue like a viper and the personality of one to boot. He was pretty sure she was going to be in the list of the 'casualties of the sacking of the castle,' just because she knew too much. She had skirted around it, of course, but she seemed to have known that the king had been alive when they took they castle, and that alone was enough.

Still, it left a bad taste in his mouth, that despite the fact that by the end, the woman had seemed to be taunting him.

_Oh, yes, I saw you yesterday, looking so intently at Gong-gil. Pretty as any woman, who's to say he isn't one? He wouldn't prove he had anything between his legs when I tried to call his bluff. Pretty, pretty Gong-gil, see him once and can't take your eyes away, eh? Ha! But still, I can't say I fault him. He's quite good at finding someone bigger and stronger to protect him and feed his ambition. It's just amazing, really. So here, some friendly advice: be careful of that one. Even if playing with boys isn't your taste, he'll find a way. How else can you explain how the king made him an adviser and gave him a title? So I wonder, eh, what'll you'll make him into? Maybe if he gets his tongue back, he can be your little interpreter. He'll roll over and betray his own kind just as well as that one you have now. And I'm sure you'd_ much _more enjoy Gong-gil's way of...rolling over. _

The way she had laughed had grated at him, his eye had been twitching by the end, and never had he been so glad an interrogation was _fucking over_.

And there was still one more to go--the infamous Gong-gil.

Angeal sat rubbing his temples for a few minutes. He was very, very tempted to say fuck it and do this one tomorrow--or at least after he'd had something to eat. But he was swamped tomorrow as well; he needed to get this all done today. Somehow. It was only four o'clock; he could soldier on through this last one and then call it a day--or at least take a break for dinner and spend the rest of his evening doing paperwork or something brainless.

He made a quick call to Lt. Park and ate some of the emergency rations he'd stuffed in the desk while he waited for Park and the guard bringing Gong-gil, and tiredly wished that he was anywhere but here--even fighting in the middle of the giant bog they called the Great Forest during the rainy season would beat this.

The guard brought Gong-gil in, and nervousness was practically radiating off the man as he came in, his eyes lowered and his shoulders hunched in, as if he was trying to make himself seem smaller than he was. His steps were hesitant, and he seemed completely lost as the guard more or less manhandled him into the chair across from Angeal's desk.

Angeal had wondered some if it had just been the terrible lighting in the glorified dungeon that had made him mistake Gong-gil for a woman at first, but no. Seeing him in the relatively good light of his 'office'...Gong-gil looked even more like a woman than he'd thought. So much so that Angeal shook his head trying to clear the cognitive dissonance resulting from knowing that Gong-gil was actually a man. It wasn't just his face, Angeal realized suddenly--Gong-gil carried himself very much like a Wutai woman did, down even to the prim way he sat looking down at his hands. His posture, his gestures, _everything_, down to the fucking _ribbon_ in his hair, it all coded as female, and it was beginning to give Angeal a headache because his brain was all but twitching at the truth versus what his eyes were trying to tell him.

The man seemed even more feminine than Jang Nok-su had been, not that that was _hard_. Mind, she'd played coy at the beginning--the king's consort knew she was an attractive woman, as well as how to use it, but Angeal was tired, cranky, hungry, had seen it all before, had zero interest in her and even if he had was above all else professional. When it had become obvious Angeal wasn't even _looking_, much _less_ taking the bait, she had dropped the act and started taunting him about Gong-gil.

And maybe she had a point, because, truth be told, in the full light of the office in the middle of the day...Gong-gil was a _lot_ more beautiful than Angeal had initially thought. And a lot more pale, he thought with a faint frown--a very sickly, unhealthy pale, and the bags underneath the guy's eyes were practically big enough to carry his Buster sword in.

...and by the _gods_, he really needed to stop trying to use metaphors, because Genesis would have thrown something at him for something that dumb.

"What's your name?" he asked. He already knew the guy's name, but niceties were important--it was a way of breaking the ice and of seeing how easily or difficult this was going to go.

It seemed it was going to be a difficult one: Gong-gil said nothing, just stared at his hands. But what bothered Angeal was that it wasn't the sullen, defiant silence he normal got with that question--this was an entirely different animal. It was the kind of silence that made him want to make the guy a cup of tea or something and throw Genesis at him with a "You...talk to him or...something, I don't know. I suck at this 'talking' crap. So you do...something" and wave his hands in the air or something to indicate how out of his depth he was.

He sincerely hoped the silence was just because the man didn't understand him. He wasn't so dense as to honestly think that was it, but still, a guy could hope. "Do you speak Visgradian?" Angeal tried. Gong-gil didn't react at all, and so Angeal asked Park to translate for him, and asked his first question again: "What is your name?"

"_Dangshin-ui ireum-eun mu-eot-imnika_?" Park said softly, frowning slightly at Gong-gil, and oh, that wasn't a good sign.

There was no answer. Angeal knew for certain the man could _hear_\--he'd watched the man just yesterday flinch at whatever it was that Jang woman had said to him--but you'd never know it now.

"OK, so, you're not a talker," Angeal said after a very, very long silence had stretched out well past the point of being comfortable. "I just need to ask you a few questions. I'm trying to figure out who should or shouldn't be in those cells. I doubt you want to be in there, that place isn't fit for man nor beast," he said, and apparently a) Gong-gil could understand Visgradian Standard and b) Angeal had said something very wrong. Gong-gil flinched, noticeably flinched, and seemed to shrink in on himself even more. He looked like Angeal had just hit him or something, and he was too used to getting blows.

Now Angeal felt kind of like a heel, and had no idea why.

"Well, I see you speak Visgradian. Can you at least nod or something? Please? So I don't feel like I'm talking to my materia for company?"

Gong-gil gave a tiny, hesitant nod before he hunched his shoulders in more. _By the gods_, Angeal wondered, _what happened to this guy? _

Completely unbidden, an image of Gong-gil's bandaged wrists floated up in Angeal's mind, and he realized whatever this was, it ran deep, deeper than the Lifestream, and had started before ShinRa had come.

And figuring out what it was might mean the difference between life and death for this guy, and realizing that reminded Angeal just how deep things ran here for him as well.

Although right now, it looked like he was going to have to figure out yes-or-no questions, meaning this was going to take _forever_. Meaning no food for him for a good, long while, and that thought made him want to bang his head against something hard.

"Your name is Gong-gil, right?" he said.

Gong-gil gave another small, hesitant nod after a long silence.

"Have you been at the palace long?" Angeal began, and Gong-gil's brow furrowed slightly, as if in confusion.

Park jumped in immediately, translating it into Chochungese, but that didn't help matters--Gong-gil did that flinchy, kicked-while-down thing that made Angeal want to scrub his face with his hand and apologize. Which was pretty much the wrong reaction for a general carrying out an interrogation.

This was going to be a _long_ interrogation.

..._or maybe not_, Angeal thought suddenly. "Are you all right?" he asked sharply. It wasn't his imagination; Gong-gil had been getting paler and paler, and now he was swaying even though he was sitting down. "Hey, now, don't you pass out on me."

Gong-gil looked up, blinking quickly, and tried to sit up straighter.

"Let's just do this later," Angeal said, shaking his head. "You're in no shape for this, and right now I'd eat my materia if I thought there was any sort of way to spit-roast it, because I haven't eaten in a good nine, ten hours. It's making me grouchy, and you look like what you need right now is a _doctor_, not an interrogation," said pragmatically.

Gong-gil looked over at him, the first reaction the man had shown the whole time, just long enough for Angeal to see the surprise registering in the man's eyes before they went flat again and he looked away.

"...Later," Angeal said, struck again almost physically by just how _pretty_ Gong-gil really was, the words more to himself than anyone, and Gong-gil reacted again--his hands tightened against his robes, slender fingers clutching nervously at his knees as he swallowed thickly, and that, that just didn't sit well with Angeal at _all_.

\--

"What do you make of him?" he asked Park, after the Gong-gil was escorted out.

Lt. Park frowned slightly, as if he was thinking. "I'm not sure, sir. He seems...broken."

Angeal made a face. "You have no idea how much I was hoping it was just my imagination."

"...Sorry, sir."

"He _really_ didn't look healthy, did he?"

"No, sir."

"I was hoping that was my imagination, too."

"Sorry, sir."

Angeal sighed. "OK. Get a medic to look at him, then, and report back to me. When he doesn't look like death warmed over, we'll try this again. It's not like there's a big rush. Dismissed."

"Sir yes, sir!" Park said once, as sharp and crisply as he always did, and with that same parade-perfect salute, left Angeal to his thoughts.

\--

_And he was wandering in the mists._

_He was alone. There was no one else around; he was alone and all that there was was the mist; obscuring everything, making him lose his way. He was trying to get...somewhere, he had no idea. He had no idea where he was, no idea where he was going, all that he knew was that he was lost. He wandered, looking left and right and growing desperate as there was nothing to help him find his way. There was only the mist._

_And a voice, like something scrittering across crumbling marble, that whispered in a way too faint to hear from inside his head. It needled at him, it put him on edge and it felt like death._

_And around him was the mist, only the mist growing deeper and thicker, covering even the sky, and it was seeping inside of him, it and the voice were seeping inside, were getting their fingers into his consciousness, and were pulling at it, trying to fray him apart and he swung, but there was nothing to hit, there was nothing, there was no one, only the mist the mist this mist and that whispering in the skittering voice on the edge of--_

He woke up with a sharp yell, his heart beating too fast, and for a moment, he had no idea where he was.

"What the fuck kind of dream was that?" he muttered to himself, shaking his head. Whatever in Hel's realm that dream had been, it creeped him out more than it rightfully should have, and the thought of trying to go back to sleep made a slight shiver of revulsion go through him.

He was up before he'd even decided what to do; slipping into his fatigues because sleeping was right out, and the thought of doing paperwork made that mist-nightmare look good. He felt played up and out-of-sorts, like there was something itching just under his skin, and he decided he ought to go out for a while--take a walk in the courtyard or something; look up and see the moon and not mists and darkness. It was the middle of the night, but it wasn't like someone would question him.

The courtyard was fairly large; big enough the walking the whole thing would tire him out, Angeal figured. And it was good to be out--the night was cool and the moon close enough to full that Angeal had no problems seeing. He'd been cooped up inside for too long. At heart he was still a country boy, preferring to be outside than in, and breathing in the fresh air helped clear his mind.

The fresh air could only do so much, however. It was unfair, he thought, that he couldn't even have a decent night's sleep. And he'd made a mistake, he realized. There were the guards and troopers on duty, but...but everything was too still, and his aloneness stabbed at him, almost a physical ache.

He pulled out his PHS and sent off a quick e-mail. _You awake?_

An answering mail--correction, _mails_, three in rapid succession--came back a minute or so later.

_No.  
Fuck you._

_And don't mail me again before sunrise unless you're dead or I *will* kill you. And if you're dead, I *will* find your zombie ass and kill you *again*.  
Asshole._

_ZZZ._

Angeal laughed, because he could imagine Genesis, not a morning person under the best of circumstances, snarling at his PHS when it went off, and sending off a mail, then deciding that didn't quit convey the full extent of his wrath. He shook his head and put the PHS away, holding on to the smile and to that one touch of connection to someone else and home. The smile faded though, and standing out in the empty courtyard under the moonlight, Angeal felt _alone_, and it was like a weight, almost worse because of that one moment of connection.

Something made a faint crackling sound, like wood breaking, under his foot.

He stopped and looked down, wondering what he had stepped on, then frowned slightly. Half buried in the dirt was an old Wutai folding fan. He stooped to pick it up and looked at it carefully. It was nothing like any of the ones in the palace he'd seen so far, delicate and full of decoration and gilding. It was larger than the normal fans and made from plain whitish cloth, ripped and torn, and the thin spines were broken, like it had been stepped on many times. It looked worn, like it had seen better days long before it had ended up under his foot.

It was completely out of place.

_Kinda like me_, he thought. _Battered, broken, a little worse for wear, all by itself and stupidly out of place, but somehow still here_.

He felt a small, self-depreciating grin touch his face, and before he knew it, he had tucked the fan into his belt, and patted it once for good luck.

It was stupid, maybe, but...somehow, it helped.

\--

Angeal's morning was going pretty much the way he hated, stuck behind a desk and dealing with a mountain of paperwork higher than Da Chao, when there was a knock on the frame of the paper door to his office and quarters.

"Come in!" he yelled, and put the papers back in their folder.

"General Hewley, sir!" the medic, Dr...something or other, he was drawing a blank, said with a sharp salute as he entered.

Dr. Constantin. That was it.

"I'm here about the prisoner you ordered examined, Gong-gil."

That got Angeal's attention. "How is he? Uh, here, have a seat," he said, waving at the chair across from his desk. "So how is he? The guy did _not_ look healthy."

"Because he's _not_," Constantin said flatly as he sat. "I swear, it's as if this place has no materia at all. Or no one with power enough to use it," he said, shaking his head in disgust. "Self-inflicted injury to his wrist, treated with herbs. _Herbs_. It's no wonder it got infected."

"Can you do anything?"

"I Cured the wound, which closed it up and will help the raging infection that had started to set in because only the gods know when that dressing had been cleaned last, and have started him on antibiotics to clear it out. Blood wise, he probably lost quite a bit when he slit his wrist, and there's nothing that can be done for that at this point," he said flatly. "Other than wait for his body to remake the blood he lost. He probably should be in a medical facility, but we're running low enough on resources for our own people," he said, giving Angeal a pointed look, and Angeal remembered there had been a pile of forms requesting more medical supplies...somewhere. "Let alone Wutai. But now that he's on antibiotics and the wound is closed up, he should be all right."

"Is blood loss and that infection the only problem?"

Dr. Constantin shook his head. "Well, there are also some bad bruises on him that are just healing, as well as signs of malnutrition that have probably gone back most of his life...but I bet half the people in this forsaken-by-the-gods pit are like that. There's not much that can be done about _that_ other than feeding him up, and the guards assure me he eats, just not very much. Which is a normal sign of being under too much stress, and 'too much stress' is a given, all things considered. Physically, he's in not in great shape but will recover. Mentally, though..." Constantin started, shaking his head, "I'm sure you noticed he's not talking."

"I picked up on that when I tried to interrogate him," Angeal said with a wry half-smile.

"Yeah. There's no physical reason for it at all."

Angeal blinked. "So he can talk, he just _won't_?"

Constantin nodded. "I worried at first that they had done something barbaric like cut out his tongue, after seeing one of the bodies where their eyes had been freshly burnt out, but no, still there."

Angeal's jaw dropped. "_What_?"

Constantin looked disgusted. "One of the bodies from the invasion. When we were sorting out the dead from the half-dead, we came across one where the man's eyes had been burnt out, and pretty recently, too. And of course he was untreated, aside from a dirty bandage tied around his face."

Angeal's eyes narrowed. "What under the Heavens happened here?" he muttered to himself. What could make someone try to kill themself like that, and then leave them so broken that they _wouldn't talk_?

"You've got me," the medic said. "I heard rumors that the 'King of Chochung' was as crazy as they came. Looks like they might be true."

Angeal frowned, thinking only of the broken man who had been sitting in the chair Dr. Constantin was now, hunching in on himself and clutching at the dirty cloth of his robes as if for support. And the fragility of his wrists in the holding area.

Something, he figured, pretty terrible had to have happened here, and it needled at him.

"Thank you," Angeal said distractedly. "Keep checking on Gong-gil, and keep me updated. Also, check the other prisoners again, make sure everyone's at least sort of healthy. Any weird or self-inflicted injuries that came _before_ we took the castle, inform me of immediately."

Constantin nodded and stood up.

Angeal smiled wryly. "And I'll see about getting you your supplies. The requisition forms are here. Somewhere," he said, gesturing at the mountain of paperwork and making a face. "I'll get to them as soon as I find them, but it might take a while."

Constantin gave a short laugh. "Thank you, sir."

"Dismissed," Angeal said, and went back to his pile of papers, but for some reason just couldn't concentrate on them anymore.

\--

It was two o'clock, and he was still stuck in a meeting with the old advisers to the king, the ones who had come to ShinRa and agreed to help them in exchange for ShinRa deposing the king.

Something didn't sit right with Angeal, working so closely with people who were, by pretty much any definition, traitors. Or so he had felt at first; seeing Gong-gil and remember some of the rumors he had heard made him wonder if there was more to this than met the eye, especially since none of the men seemed like they were in this for power. It was agreed that this arrangement was temporary; that a successor to the king, one who would be properly loyal to ShinRa, would be put in place, and Chochung would, so long as she didn't rebel, more or less be left alone. Angeal wanted to speed this process on as much as he could--he didn't like sitting here every day fighting with paperwork and trying to figure out mysteries...trying to decide who had to be killed for knowing too much. He preferred the battlefield, where, bloody and horrible as it was, things were a shitload _simpler_. Everyone had guns and swords, and everyone knew where they stood. Not...this.

...and having this after lunch had not been one of Angeal's brightest ideas; this was boring as all else, and slowly putting Angeal to sleep. The only thing keeping him awake was him biting the inside of his mouth when he felt like he was about to nod off, and at this rate, he was going to end up bleeding or something.

He had no idea how Park did it; Park was as much at attention as he had been when the meeting started. Then he noticed Park pinching his leg, and Angeal had to bite back a grin--it was nice to know he wasn't the _only_ one bored stupid. Everyone spoke Visgradian Standard, but it was easier to have Park there--in case there were misunderstandings, and, more importantly, so the advisers couldn't say something in front of him with the assumption he _wouldn't understand_.

They may have helped ShinRa, but Angeal made _no_ assumptions that they were on _ShinRa's_ side.

"We would like to place the king's half brother in his stead," Hong said formally. "He seems, unlike his brother, to be more than capable, and he is aware of the...political realities. He has stated that he accepts them and will swear loyalty to ShinRa."

Angeal frowned slightly--this was awfully _sudden_. In fact, it seemed like they had already decided and were expecting him to simply rubber stamp it. Probably, he thought dryly, they already had decided well before they came to him. And the gods all knew it would be better to get some sort of security in Chochung, and the longer ShinRa was sitting in the castle, the longer it would look like the occupation it was, and the more likely some of the more radical elements would decide it was time to try to take their country back.

And it wasn't like he wanted to be here.

Still, they couldn't just turn everything over in a week, like Hong, Yu, Bak, and Seong, the men who had come to ShinRa, seemed to think. Angeal and ShinRa weren't going anywhere, even with putting a puppet in charge.

It was Angeal's job to make sure it was, in fact, a puppet they put up, and he was going to do his job because, dammit, once he left the Great Forest, he never wanted to fucking see it again.

"I'll meet with him, then," Angeal said flatly. "Have him, and any other candidates you may have, ready to meet with me sometime in the next month."

Seong frowned. "But...Prince Yeok is the next in the line of succession. He should be--"

"Lines of succession change," Angeal said just as flatly, cutting them off. "Don't forget that."

There was a long silence, and Angeal stared them all down. They would not, after all, forget that it was ShinRa, not them, calling the shots now.

"Understood," Hong said with a low bow, and Park narrowed his eyes. There was some slight there, Angeal thought, but he didn't care as long as he got what he wanted. "Is there anything else that you would wish?"

Angeal frowned suddenly, and debated whether or not to even ask, and then the question was out before he could stop it. "Actually, I've got a question for you, and it's got nothing to do with succession, but it might with Yeonsan-gun. The man, Gong-gil...what was his position here?"

Hong drew in a sharp breath, then pursed his lips tightly. "A player. A foul, manipulative little street performer and nothing more. It was he, more than anything else, that was the cause of the king's madness."

That matched what the woman in the cells had said...but it didn't match what Angeal had seen; a pale and broken man with slit wrists, huddled against a wall. It just...it didn't fit, something just didn't fit.

"I see," Angeal said, frowning. "Thank you. That's all," he said, his words a dismissal. The former officials all bowed and left one by one, and Angeal stared after them, frowning more to himself. Something didn't fit.

Something just didn't fit.

\--

"Lt. Park, I've got a job for you," Angeal said once the advisers had left his office, and put on a big grin because he knew this was going to go over well.

Lt. Park was a smart man. "Sir?" he said, something wary touching his voice.

"I'm trying to figure out what happened here, before we took the castle," Angeal said. "There look to be a lot of records that were kept by the court scribes. But I can't read Wutai aside from 'bathroom,' 'booze,' and 'kimchee'." Angeal's grin grew. "Which means _you_ get to do it."

Park look less than enthused. "...Understood, sir."

\--

"_I've come with a request from General Hewley_," Park said formally. "_I wish to request access to all court records for the last six months, possibly more_."

"_This is rather sudden_," Seong, one of the former advisers to the king said. "_We were told ShinRa would stay out of things, once we had set someone appropriate in place_."

"_Things have changed_," Park said, stiffly. "_General Angeal is requesting information for his investigations_."

"_What sort of information? If there is anything he needs to know, we can tell him directly._"

Park gave the man a level stare, knowing full well it would unseat the man, because such things were simply not done in Wutai--you only looked someone in the eye if they were of a lower station, and Park figured the man needed to be reminded that while he was once a nobleman and adviser to the king...things had changed. His king was dead and his province conquered, and those were the realities.

"_That will not be necessary. This is now part of an official ShinRa investigation, and we will be reviewing all evidence ourselves. Which is why I am informing you that I would like immediate access to all court records from the last six months_," Park said flatly, but making it clear in his tone and word choice, dropping all the formal polite speech normally used by someone younger to an elder of high status, that he was the one of higher status and this was not a request. "_Please take me to your record rooms_ immediately."

They may all have called him ShinRa's dog behind his back, but it was the dog calling the shots, and he was not going to allow them to forget this. And he was not going to be swayed from his orders by men with something to hide.

Seong narrowed his eyes and drew a sharp, insulted breath, but bowed sharply. "_Very well. Follow me_."

\--

"_This isn't good_," Seong said, frowning. He had sent messages to the others not long after Park had made his requests, and they were meeting quietly, in secret, as they sometimes did. "_It looks like that little player is starting to get his hooks into the ShinRa people and may be why that fool of a general is becoming so difficult. If Gong-gil has indeed begun to sink his claws into him as he did the king, it's not going to take long before he finds a way to make a mess of everything_," he said, narrowing his eyes. "_We've already seen the madness he causes in people. We may have traded one mad king for another_."

They all looked concerned, before Yu, friend to the man the king had killed, spoke up. "_We have all seen the madness he causes, and have lost those who put the country first by trying to rid the king of his clown. We have all seen the way that only death and misery have come in the wake of Gong-gil, even for those he values above others, like the player Jang-saeng. We cannot afford to wait until the ShinRa general is as enamored as the king. We must remove him now, and we must do it _quietly. _We _must_ be rid of this meddlesome clown. Before we find _ourselves _shot through with arrows this time_," he finished grimly.

There was an equally grim silence, and they all began to nod.


	2. Part Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Somehow, ShinRa be damned, he was going to make something better for someone.

The days slipped into weeks, and there were certain constants: insurgency, paperwork and secrecy. An outbreak of the first that had had to be put down and _hard_ had led to a build-up of the second, and so Angeal was currently in the midst of too much of it that which was in regards to the third, and after three hours of it, Angeal was strongly considering blasting his laptop with a Thundaga just for a _break._

And the goddess was truly merciful, because before he could equip his Thundaga there was a knock on his door, and Angeal wondered who under the Heavens it could possibly be. And not caring, because it was a _distraction_. "Come in!"

He wasn't really expecting anyone, but he _really_ wasn't expecting Dr. Constantin.

"Yeah?" he said, saving his work and closing his laptop quickly. ShinRa medic or not, the man didn't have the clearance to see what Angeal was working on just then. Hel's realm, Angeal wished he didn't have the clearance for it given what it was, but that was neither here nor there. Orders were orders, war was war, being in command had a price, and a conscience never got you very far in ShinRa--the gods only knew how often Angeal had found himself wondering if he was the only person in the whole damned company who ever lost any sleep over the things they had to do. "What's going on?" he said with a frown. Dr. Constantin was looking pretty grim, and a grim looking medic was _never_ a good sign.

"Remember how you wanted me to keep you updated on that mute Wutai man, Gong-gil?"

His frown deepened at the name. Gong-gil hadn't slipped his mind, per se, but he hadn't been able to really follow up on him, not with everything of the last two weeks--two insurgency attacks one _right after_ the other, one of which had been uncomfortably close to the Daerimmun and _both_ requiring more manpower than he had to comfortably spare because the geniuses in Midgar had decided that since they had the castle, they could spare some of his troopers to go to Taishang and Gwongnaam, and Angeal had spent the last two days arguing that if they took any more of his men they might as well give Chochung back to Emperor Kisaragi with a big fucking bow around it. "Yeah. I _still_ need to interrogate him, but I need him not about to pass out for that. Is he finally up for it?" Something about Constantin's expression told him that answer was probably 'no,' but one could always hope.

"Someone tried to kill him. He's been poisoned," Dr. Constantin said grimly, and Angeal felt the bottom drop out of his stomach.

"_What_?!"

\--

It had been stupid, Angeal realized now, to leave most of the Wutai castle workers from before in the kitchens. It was just...they didn't have the _manpower_, they honestly didn't. It had seemed easier to just set guards in place and let the palace run as it always had, _especially_ since ShinRa hadn't sent over what they deemed non-essential personnel, and was in fact actively shipping the people he did have _out_. They considered Chochung secure, since the Chochungese themselves had been the ones helping them bring down Yeonsan-gun, but the problem was that "a handful of advisers in Daerimmun" didn't _even_ begin to equal "all of Chochung."

But everything had been going fine, in the castle at least--because all of them had been hit and hit hard by the Yeonsan-gun's insanity and were too nervous by default to try anything...until someone had tried to poison Gong-gil.

In a grim way, it was almost nice to know that whoever had done this hadn't been a terrorist gunning for ShinRa, but someone bound and determine to carry out old vengeances now that they had the chance.

But what it meant was that there was a threat and security breach; one he had to handle and handle _fast_. And that meant _more fucking interrogations_.

Never had the idea of summarily executing everyone looked so good, and it highly disturbed Angeal that he considered it for even a split second.

He hated it here.

Angeal shook his head at himself and headed down to the medical facilities. This was on some level his damned fault, and he figured he owed it to Gong-gil to go see him and find out how he was doing.

The castle was large, and one section of it had been dedicated to the medics and had been turned into a semi-decent field hospital.

"General in the room!" someone yelled as soon as he went in, and everyone able whirled around to face him and salute; those in their beds went as close to formal as they could and those that were able saluted.

"At ease, as you were," Angeal said, then looked around. "Where's Dr. Constantin?"

"Just a moment, sir, I'll go get him," one of the medics said, and it never stopped being weird, being called 'sir' by people twice his age.

"Thanks," he said, looking around. He'd been down here only two or three times in the last month--the Wutai had some nasty poisons and weapons and a great love of putting those two together; there were more than a few people here recovering from things Cure and normal Remedies or Esuna couldn't fix. It was insane, how much the Wutai knew about materia, for all they never seemed to use any materia at all. He had no idea how by the Ferryman they did it.

It was the not needing materia that had caused the war to drag on for so long--the Wutai had ways of countering half the things they threw at them with materia; it seemed like only high-level materia and the most powerful SOLDIERs managed to make a dent in things. It was why he, Genesis, and especially Sephiroth had risen so quickly in the ranks; they were amongst the few that _could_ actually make a dent in things, with their affinity for materia and magic and their strength. The three of them also were good with people, as odd as that was when put in connection with Sephiroth--Sephiroth may have been as cold and distant as they came, on the surface, at least, but he knew how to lead troops and would bring the last man out, and that alone inspired loyalty, and there were few men who wouldn't follow as gifted a strategist as Sephiroth. Genesis, well, Genesis just had a way with _people_; put him in a group and everyone would be following him within the hour, it seemed like. Angeal had no idea what it was that made people so willing to follow him; he wasn't nearly as brilliant as Sephiroth or as charismatic as Genesis, so he just chalked it up to him giving a damn about the people under his command. He knew that they might be killed because of his orders, and he never forgot it. Their lives were his responsibility, and he took that responsibility seriously.

While he waited for Constantin, he spoke to the troopers and SOLDIERs around him, seeing how they were doing and asking if there was anything they needed. Most of them said they were fine, but one kid, who couldn't have been more than fifteen if he was a day, asked wistfully for some paper or something so he could write home, and Angeal nodded, saying he'd see to it.

"Thank you, sir," the kid said. "I'm sure my ma, she's real worried about me."

"Where are you from? Midgar?" Angeal asked, guessing by the kid's accent. Angeal hadn't been in Midgar more than a short while himself, but the kid's accent was pure Midgar slums.

The boy nodded. "Yeah. Ma, she didn't want me goin' off to war or nothin', but I figured, yeah, big glory an' all that," he said, giving a lopsided grin, and Angeal laughed.

"I was the same way," he said. "And I probably should write my mother, too. Mothers are good at worrying."

The kid grinned, then grimaced and tried to cover it. "Yeah. My Ma, she worries all the time. I shoulda wrote her before. Got nothin' but time now," he said, staring down at his legs--or judging by the shape, the _leg_\--under the sheets. "Ain't gonna be fightin' nothin' no time soon, after all."

Angeal patted the boy's shoulder, then looked around when he heard a voice behind him call out, "General Angeal, sir!"

"Take care," Angeal said, standing up. The kid, Jeffries, nodded and gave a small salute, and Angeal went over to Constantin.

"Let me guess, here to check on our Wutai guest?" Constantin said, once they were out of earshot, and Angeal nodded. "I figured it'd be a good idea to keep him away from the guys out here, all things considered."

"Probably a good idea," Angeal said wryly. He was no fool; everyone in there had been injured by the Wutai and were still inclined to "kill first, questions never" where the Wutai were concerned.

"And this way, we can monitor him better--keep an eye on him, and watch his food. The only food he gets is the food we're preparing here ourselves for all the patients."

"Good," Angeal said, nodding once. "What in Hel's named happened?

"Oh, and before I forget...can you get some paper and an envelope for Jeffries over there? He said he wanted to write his mother," Angeal said, wanting to get that straight before he got distracted, glancing over at the boy's bed. Jeffries was staring out at nothing, and Angeal wondered what had to be going through his mind.

Constantin nodded. "Not a problem, sir."

"Thanks," Angeal said with a nod. There was too much happening, and he wanted to take care of that with Jeffries while he was thinking about it. "And back to the poisoning. What happened?"

Constantin's face grew grim. "Someone slipped something into his food. And only his food; no one else in the cells showed any signs of poisoning. And the guy is lucky; the only reason it was found in time was because the guard noticed something was wrong pretty quickly; if too much more time had passed, you'd be dealing with a murder, not an attempted murder."

"Are you sure it was a deliberate poisoning?" Angeal asked, hoping for some other reason to explain this.

"Very," Constantin said, shaking his head. "I ran toxicity tests when I did his blood work, and none of what showed up is anything that could have accidentally gotten into just his food. Hel's realm, I'm not even a hundred percent sure what I'm working with. Normal Remedies don't have any effect. A fully-mastered Esuna helped some, but not nearly enough, and the only ones that do are the Wutai ones--so can you have your boys take out some of the Wutai materia and Master them for us next time they're on a mission?"

Angeal nodded. It made a sick sort of sense, really--materia were the crystallized memories of the Planet; it would seem those memories were location-based in some respects, because how could you expect a materia from Mideel to heal a poison from plants in Wutai? He suspected it was part of why ShinRa was so interested in the Wutai materia; he could only imagine what sort of things they would be able to recombine it with materia from other parts of the Planet to make.

Truthfully, it kind of terrified him--while it was possible they might make amazing advances in healing materia, only the gods knew what kind of weapons ShinRa would make, and weapons really were more ShinRa's style.

"I've also had to order special Remedies from Midgar, with the hopes those will work, since the newer ones have been formulated for some of these Wutai toxins," Constantin continued. "It'd help if had a clue what had even poisoned him, if for no other reason than I could ship it back to Midgar and let the science departments have at it." He sighed. "For now, I'm just fighting the symptoms and hoping he pulls through without too many side effects. His liver damned near gave out," he said, looking disgusted. "We've had to keep throwing Curaga and Esuna at him to keep his liver from completely failing from trying to flush all that crap out of him."

"How is he now?"

"Stable," Constantin said. "Barely, but stable. We've got him knocked out all the time with Sleep and hit him with Esuna and Curaga once his stats start tanking. We're having to do it less and less, thank Odin," he said tiredly. "We actually managed to go most of today so far without it, so he's getting better. Damned if I can figure what the Wutes put in that crap, but they were bound and determined to kill that guy--if we hadn't had fully-mastered Esuna and Curaga, he'd have died. And here he is," Constantin said, and drew back the curtain shielding Gong-gil.

"Grey-eyed Minerva," Angeal let out. He'd thought Gong-gil had looked fragile before, but it was nothing to this--the man looked as if a breath would break him...and so beautiful in that fragility that Angeal was almost glad for it, because it left him unable to breathe that breath for a split second. It was horrible and beautiful, all at once, and it hit him worse than seeing Gong-gil for the first time in that cell had; for the first time, he understood, truly _understood_, what Genesis had _meant_ about _theia mania_ when he would go off on one of his literary tears...because only a divine madness could explain _this_, how seeing someone so ill and broken could hit him so hard in a way he couldn't fully understand. It was like before, in the cells, when he had seen Gong-gil clutching weakly at his robes and his bandaged wrist the one image of the man that he hadn't been able to shake. Even now that first image came to him and clawed at something in him, at something in a way he didn't fully understand.

Angeal wondered what the fuck was wrong with him, then decided not think too hard about what Genesis would have to say about this.

Some rational part of him was trying to figure the situation out; he had a nagging feeling that someone had tried this because Gong-gil no longer had Yeonsan-gun's protection. Which meant that Gong-gil was tied to the Mad King, and probably would have to be executed.

Some part of him, looking at Gong-gil so pale and broken and _beautiful_ in the hospital bed, refused. _Theia mania_, divine madness; some part of him _refused_, refused all of this, refused that the most out of all of the shit he had had to do since he had first set foot in Chochung and was still having to do, all the things that tore at his conscience and caused him to wake up shaking in the middle of the night and hating what war was making him become. _No more_, part of him said. _Not any more_.

He was going to find out what had happened. He was going to figure out this mystery, why someone wanted Gong-gil dead so much, what had happened to make the man try to kill himself. Whatever had happened before was obviously still going on, and he was going to end it. He was going to set something right, by the _gods_. Everything had been destruction and killing and he was _sick_ of it. Looking at this broken man, broken long before ShinRa had come and shades of whatever it had been still trying to break him, he _refused_.

Somehow, _somehow_...ShinRa be damned, he was going to make something _better_ for _someone_.

"I want," Angeal said, staring down at Gong-gil, "a guard on him at all times. In fact, I want the guy who noticed when he was poisoned assigned to him, since he was so quick before. Access to him is hereby restricted. I am going to find out what in Hel's name happened here," Angeal said tightly, because by all the gods, he was.

\--

"_We will never be rid of that noxious clown_," Yu said stiffly. "_Hewley has him under constant guard, now_."

Seong shook his head. "_ShinRa will not be here forever. If nothing else, we can expel him from the palace once the boy playing at a general ShinRa has installed here has accepted Yi Yeok..._"

"_We have no proof he will!_" Yu said sharply. "_The only proof we have is that he's already favoring that clown somehow, and has said he wants 'time' before he sets a successor for Yeonsan-gun! Who knows how long we'll have to wait, and the longer Gong-gil lives, the more chances he has to get his hooks into the Boy General. We knew it was going to take time, but now we can't afford to wait._"

Hong, the fifth conspirator against Yeonsan-gun, spoke slowly. "_We may have acted hastily, though_," he said, knowing no one was going to like what he had to say. "_Yes, we all saw his majesty's insanity where the clown was concerned...but we may have drawn unnecessary attention to him. Hewley may have shown interest in Gong-gil before, but now he is most definitely going to have his eye on the clown. _

_Let us wait_," he said faintly. "_Let us see what ShinRa's puppet general does_."

"_Wait for him to discover us?_" Yu said sourly.

"_He will not_," Bak said, just as stiffly. "_He has no idea what happened in regards to the king and Gong-gil and no way of finding out what happened, even with his interrogations. Servants and cooks? What do they know? Nothing that will connect any of it with us._"

"_And the one who delivered the poison_?" Hong asked uncertainly. "_Was it not one of the 'servants and cooks'_?"

"_She will not speak_," Seong said sharply. "_Do you think me a fool? She was given gil for her family and sent away. With so many leaving now that the king is gone and they are not forced to stay, who will miss one fool of a serving girl who has left the castle for her home now that she can_?"

Hong said nothing, but knew then that precautions, more than the ones already in place, had to be taken.

The fragile peace would not be broken, nor would succession, nor the mandates of the Heavens, and _nor_ would they lose their positions--not for ShinRa, and not for King Yeonsan-gun's _clown_.

\--

The insurgencies were dying down, slowly--aided in no small part, Angeal thought dryly, with the number of insurgents going down. They had begun a new strategy, one Sephiroth had designed in the Yamato province, of sending in small, surgical strike teams of the more elite SOLDIERs to root out areas that were hotbeds in one fell swoop. It had worked wonders in Yamato--that, and the Sacking of Nankyo.

Angeal was almost jealous of how Sephiroth had handled that, just burning the city and being done with it rather than taking it over, and then he had himself a nice bottle of the stuff they had in Wutai that almost compared to Gongagan moonshine because that beat thinking too hard about things and just what that sacking probably meant. But the insurgencies going down meant less collateral damage, and fewer of his men sent out into harm's way--the shit for poisons and toxins the Wutai loved to use, in Chochung especially, didn't have as much of an impact on SOLDIERs, not with all the mako and whatever else the scientists had cobbled together that they had in them, and a pair of SOLDIERs could in one or two hours do more damage to the Wutai and take less than an entire squadron. Angeal'd been out on most of them and had more than enough paperwork on all of them to sign off on.

And he knew that he should have delegated an attempted murder investigation of a Wutai national to...well, someone what wasn't _him_.

He knew he could have and should have, that it wasn't his job and he _ignored_ that. This had been one of his prisoners and he was responsible, by the gods. He knew he needed to be focusing on if he was even supposed to be letting Gong-gil live or not, not who had tried to kill him, because if it turned out Gong-gil was to be a "casualty of the fall of the castle," then this was all for nothing

But...but he wanted to _know_. Know what happened under his watch, what risks there were to him and his men, and, when he was being honest with himself, wanted to know why under the Heavens someone would be that bound and determined to kill Gong-gil of all people. Angeal had only met him face-to-face that once, but it was enough to know that, despite what the advisers and that Jang woman had said, the man was, well, _harmless_.  Harmless and...broken, so much even now it nagged at Angeal. It wasn't just that he felt sorry for him--it was just...he just couldn't leave _anyone_ like that, looking so utterly lost and hopeless.

Truthfully, he honestly didn't know what he was doing, and knew just enough about why he was doing it to feel like he was lying to himself about something--whatever was making him take this up like he was, it wasn't about a security breach, it wasn't about guilt, it wasn't about fixing a mistake his oversight had caused, all of which he told himself it was, it wasn't even about something as stupid as Gong-gil being _beautiful_\--but fuckall if he knew _what it was_, or why seeing Gong-gil so broken had gotten to him. It wasn't the first time he had seen broken people, and he knew it wouldn't be the last.

But it had gotten to him.

Badly.

The interrogations ran so long and took up so much time Angeal wondered what in the Ferryman's name he was doing--it wasn't like he didn't have enough to do. But that hadn't stopped him, and Park had been invaluable--Park was working his way through the scrolls that were the court records and questioning the five former advisers to the king...and they, both the records and the advisers, were being, according to Park, less than helpful.

The serving girl now was the last one to be interrogated, and he figured that to be a good thing, because he was starting to get a headache.

"You," Angeal said softly. "How long have you worked in the kitchens?"

She answered quickly once Park finished translating. "About two or three years, sir."

"What was your job?"

"I mainly brought his majesty his food and drink and I helped in the kitchens."

"What do you know about the man Gong-gil? Anything you can tell me would be a help."

The girl faltered slightly. Finally, she said, "The King would call Gong-gil to his chambers many nights. Near the end..." She fell silent, and after it was translated for him, Angeal waited for her to continue. She said nothing more, and he finally pressed.

"So they were lovers?" Angeal felt something inside him twitching with irritation. If someone had tried to kill Gong-gil because he had been sleeping with a guy who was now _dead_, he was going to strangle someone, because that was fucking ridiculous. It'd explain it, but Minerva's spear, what a stupid reason.

She looked uncomfortable, and finally said, "I would bring them food and drink. Usually Gong-gil was performing plays with puppets or shadow figures. The king seemed always greatly amused, almost..almost like a child. But..." she trailed off, and finally said, "But by the end Gong-gil would only beg the king to let him go or for forgiveness. Beyond that...I don't know."

"Thank you," Angeal said tiredly. The girl was only a servant, that much was obvious. And she would have no more useful information for him, other than painting grimmer details on the picture Angeal was getting in his mind of the whole mess--this had something to do with Gong-gil and the king, for all the king was _dead_.

He wished he could let it go at that for an explanation. He wished the image of Gong-gil huddled in the cell and of his pale, fragile wrists didn't haunt him, and the image of Gong-gil barely alive in a hospital bed didn't haunt him more.

And he wished, more than anything, that he was anywhere but _here_, in the middle of a war that never seemed to have an end.

"You can go," he said. When Park translated, the girl bowed deeply and headed to the door, escorted by a trooper.

But at the door, she stopped suddenly, and spoke softly.

"The king," she said, and Park's translation was almost instantaneous, "once ordered Gong-gil to shoot me with arrows while he held me. It was a game to him," she said, and something bitter and angry flared in her voice that Angeal didn't need an interpreter to understand or her to face him to see. "I thought he would not shoot, but finally he did. The arrow lodged in that pole, by the king's head. And maybe it is wrong of me, but I wish he had not missed. I wish he had killed the king. I was one of the thousand the king ordered seized and brought here to act as servants or concubines. My life meant nothing. The king ordered me brought here and he ordered me killed while play-acting the way he killed his advisers. The king was _mad_. He was as mad as they say, and by the end most of his madness was for Gong-gil.

"Ask about the play and the night the dowager died," she said softly, and Park's own voice was strangely thoughtful. "If you want to know about the madness of the king for his clown, ask about the _play_."

\--

Angeal wanted to rip out his hair, hit things, do _something_. "A play," he said. "A _play_. " He put his face in his hands and groaned. "Why did they stick _me_ here and not Genesis? This would have been _right_ up his alley."

"Sir?" Park asked, looking confused.

"Never mind," Angeal said, waving his hand. Lt. Park had never met Genesis, which explained the perplexed look on his face, and it wasn't worth the explanation. "What in Hel's name happened here?" Angeal said, feeling frustrated. "How are you coming with those scrolls?"

"I may have found something, sir," Lt. Park said.

"Thank Minerva for something," Angeal said, looking hopeful. "What did you find?"

"Yeonsan-gun had made Gong-gil an adviser."

Angeal's eyes bugged out. "He _what_? Wait...everything said that Gong-gil had been a street performer, how--?!" he began.

Park shrugged slightly. "Jang Nok-su was apparently not...completely of the ruling class herself," he said tactfully. "However, what is the most unusual is that he named Gong-gil to be an adviser during the mourning period for the dowager queen. Very, very shortly after she died, in fact. Within only a few days."

Angeal frowned. "'The night the dowager died'," he said to himself. A picture was forming in his mind--that the king had been mad, and Gong-gil, a member of a performance troop, had been so favored by the king as to be made an adviser, and that alone, he figured, might have been reason for someone to have tried to kill Gong-gil..._before_ ShinRa came. Which left him exactly where he had started, not having a clue what had gone on and an even bigger mystery staring him in the face, where an answer either way would either save Gong-gil's life from further attempts on it, or wind up with Angeal having to kill the man himself. Add to that that half the people who had been important at court had killed themselves rather than be captured and all the ones who knew anything weren't talking, and it was turning into an even bigger nightmare. "Find out about that play, lieutenant. I want to know exactly what happened that night."

Park nodded, and yelled a sharp, "Sir, yes sir!"

\--

Park was expecting this to be far more of a hassle than it needed to be. "_I am looking for information about the night the dowager queen died, and the play that occurred that night_."

"_What? Why_?" Seong said, looking baffled.

Park just stared at him, one eyebrow raised as if Seong had had no business to question his demands. And truthfully, Park thought, he didn't. This was a battle of wills, and he would not back down.

"..._Why under the Heavens is he so interested in that clown_?" Seong finally burst out in frustration when Park refused to speak.

"_That is of no relevance_," Park said flatly, but taking note at how instantly Seong had jumped to Gong-gil. "_General Hewley has given me my orders_."

Seong made a dismissive noise. "_ShinRa is run by boys playacting as men_," he muttered.

"_Boys with the ability to decide the future of the Chochung province_," Park said flatly, intentionally referring to Chochung as a mere province of Wutai instead of the autonomous area that it acted like it was. The Kisaragi emperors had let Chochung act like a vassal state rather than a province as some sort of reparations for some wrong done centuries ago--it was a polite fiction they all engaged in, allowing the province to choose its own leaders rather than installing them from the north, but it was still considered merely a province of the empire and not a separate country everywhere else in Wutai and the world. The Chochung were proud and kept their 'king' and ignored the politics allowing them their "autonomy," but Park would allow no such fiction when it came to ShinRa and their position in ShinRa's eyes. "_And your future in it_," he said, those words pointed for all they were _intentionally_ uninflected, and Seong sucked in air angrily between his teeth.

"_Very well_," Seong said, and there was something sharp and angry in his voice. "_Since you are all so enamored with Gong-gil, perhaps you should see the type of person he truly was_." Seong narrowed his eyes, then stood. "_You want records, so be it. I will bring you the records. So you can see for yourselves what Gong-gil truly_ is."

"_Thank you_," Park said blandly, the words the barest level of politeness possible, and he watched Seong bristle.

\--

He was working on about three hours of sleep, and it had not put Angeal in the best of moods.

He'd gone to bed at a reasonable hour; the problem had been the nightmares. He'd had them off and on, growing with more frequency as the war dragged on. Last night had been useless for sleep; every time he tried he dreamed of being lost in the Great Forest, surrounded by the dead. Or worse, lately of the _mists_, where he was lost and wandering and felt like he would never escape.

He was getting _really_ sick of the nightmares.

He had, once, asked Sephiroth if he ever had them, long before Chochung had fell, when the nightmares were less frequent but more full of death and burning bodies.

Sephiroth had looked completely perplexed--for him, at any rate--and like he couldn't fathom what Angeal was talking about. 'Why would I have nightmares?' he'd asked, and Angeal just shook his head and said never mind.

He'd asked Genesis, too, and Genesis had rolled his eyes--Angeal was sure of it, even from over the phone--and asked if Angeal had hit his head.

It made Angeal feel like a failure--like he wasn't good enough to be and do what he was supposed to. This was all just part of what was expected of him, expected of all of them, and he was the only one who couldn't just suck it up and do his job. And he never mentioned it to anyone else--last thing he needed was to be called in for the ShinRa headshrinkers to try and patch him up.

So he'd had too little sleep, and was now staring rather stupidly at a half-finished report for Lazard and thinking rather wistfully of more coffee.

"Sir!"

Angeal looked up from his computer. "At ease, lieutenant. What's that?" he said, frowning slightly at the large, hand-bound book Lt. Park was holding.

"A copy of 'The Sad Tale of the Deposed Empress', sir. The play that was performed the night the dowager died, sir."

Angeal hit the shortcut commands to save his work so quickly he was glad he had a special model designed to handle SOLDIER reflexes, and shut the machine down. "I hope there's a translation with it, Park."

"You won't need one, sir," Park said, and Angeal just gave Park a confused look, because what did that mean?

He found out pretty quickly--the playbook was not a script, but a picture book. "Why aren't there any words?" he said, blinking as he flipped the pages.

"Most of the poor here can not read, sir," Park said matter-of-factly, and Angeal shook his head.

Couldn't... "That'll be one good thing ShinRa does, then," he muttered, thinking not for the first time about how _fucking backwards_ Chochung was. It was as if the place were still stuck in the fucking Warring Era or something. "Build some fucking _schools_."

He turned his attention back to the play, trying to puzzle out what was happening.

"That person is the king," Park said, pointing to one character.

"King Yeonsan-gun?"

"I'm not sure, sir" Park said, shaking his head. "I only know it is the king because he has the _ouja_ character for king there," he said, pointing it out. Angeal noticed it then, and was glad for it--it was one of the small set of Wutai characters nearly everyone in Midgar knew, and one he'd picked up after moving there to join the army, and at least it was something familiar, unlike the squiggles they had started using in Chochung for writing...the ones who _could_ write, at any rate. "And this woman appears to be the empress. This," he said, pointing out another character, "is the king's mother."

"Thank you," Angeal said, and started staring at the pictures again. There was a definite story here, two women talking as they looked at the moon, and the king going past them towards another, the empress. There seemed to be some kind of intrigue, the two slighted women talking to the king's mother.

And then things got _weird_. The king, with his mother behind him, walking him to the empress and holding out a bowl in a way to make it look like the king was giving it. The empress drank it and then collapsed.

Angeal narrowed his eyes sharply. "Wait...wait, was this woman _poisoned_?!"

"It would appear so, sir, yes."

There was no way this was a coincidence. There was no way it could be. If it was a coincidence he would eat his bloody materia, every last one. "What role did Gong-gil play in this?"

"I'm not certain, sir. He was probably one of the women. Women do not perform in plays here, men do the roles."

"Find out...no. No, I'm going to look into this right now," he said, slamming the book shut. "Come with me," he said, and was on his feet and out the door with the play in his hands before even _Park_ could agree.

\--

Angeal headed straight towards the hall the advisers had their quarters. He didn't care who he found; one of the five would know what in Hel's name had happened.

He found someone pretty quickly, so quickly it really made Angeal wonder uncomfortably if the five didn't have spies all over the castle, watching his every move from somewhere.

The paranoia it was causing in him was another reason he really wished Chochung would just fall into the ocean.

"May I help you, General?" Yu said, bowing deeply from where he was waiting in the hallway.

"Yes. Yes, you can. Is there a place where we can talk?"

"If my humble quarters would--" Yu began.

"Yes, yes, fine," Angeal said, not feeling like dealing with the polite bullshit. Yu looked taken aback, but Angeal just didn't care. He followed Yu, and when they reached his outer chamber, Angeal dropped down heavily onto the floor, and dropped the play just as heavily on the table between them.

Yu took one look at the book--at the title written so primly on the left side--and blanched slightly.

"So. What is this?" he said.

"A play, General," Yu said, and Angeal just crossed his arms and _stared_.

"It is a very badly written and slanderous version of the death of Queen Jeheon. It paints her as a virtuous woman, wrongfully treated, when she was anything but."

"Who was she?"

"The second wife of King Seongjong and mother to King Yeonsan-gun. He inherited her foul spirit," Yu said, looking disgusted.

"She was poisoned?"

"Showing how this play is a lie...she did die, yes. But the dowager, Grand Queen Insu, did not manipulate his late majesty into poisoning her. She was not the victim of scheming, she was the one who poisoned those she was jealous of or feared might take her place. And when she was exiled, there was no grand call for the king to care for her son," he said, looking even more disgusted.

"_This_ is why the king was mad," Yu said vehemently. "He had never accepted his mother's death. First he blamed his father and refused to honor the memory of his father as a son should, or venerate his wisdom. Instead he sulked and exiled all those who reminded him to look to his father's example to rule. And then came this ridiculous play, full of lies and half-truths about the reason she was put to death, and it served only to fuel his madness. He began to see Gong-gil as his mother, I suppose. When Gong-gil 'died' in the play, His Majesty screamed out 'Mother, mother!' and ran to Gong-gil, and embraced him.

"And then," he said, going tense and still, "he looked over to his father's former concubines, the ones slandered so vilely in the play, and killed them. When the dowager tried to protect them, he cast her aside and her heart failed her.

"That very night," Yu said, his fists clinching into fists, "His Majesty called Gong-gil to his chambers and offered him a position at court. We mourned the dowager, who had done so much to aid her country, while he recklessly promoted his...playthings. And once he had spilled blood, he saw no value in anyone's life."

Angeal's PHS rang, and the sound was sharp and jolting. "Excuse me," he said. His PHS almost never rang, and when it did, it was either an emergency, extremely important, or Genesis was bored, and either of the three had to be attended to immediately because the consequences of not could be world destroying.

"Yes?"

"General Hewley, sir?"

He frowned, not placing the voice at first. "Yes, who is this?"

"This is Constantin in medical, sir. The last shipment from Midgar today had all the supplies I had requested, including some bang-up new Remedies. So I just thought might you like to know that our Wutai 'Sleeping Princess' just broke the curse and is finally awake," Constantin ended, and suddenly, things got a _lot_ more complicated.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And while he'd never believed in juin before, he couldn't deny that the patterns here were making him cold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also, if any of you have read one of my other fic, "The Things You Never Knew About People," then you know the Wutai characters are called 'wuzi' (吳字, 'Wu letters', similar to how hanzi/kanji/hanja are 'Han letters'). Since Park is Chochungese, he uses the native Chochungese word for wuzi, which is "ouja." ....I'll, um, stop being a nerd now. Also, on the "other fic" note, Chímaira references "The Griffin and the Chimera." You don't have to read it; I'm just all for internal canon consistency.
> 
> This part contains massive spoilers for "The King and the Clown." ...And, kinda ironically, "The King and the Clown" contains massive spoilers for this fic (skillz, yes, I know). So it all kinda depends on which way you want to be spoiled. Here's your last chance to choose one spoiler over the other. ^^;;

One problem with Gong-gil being awake--one of _many_\--was pretty immediate.

Just where to _put_ the poor guy.

Angeal put his elbows on his desk, buried his face in his hands, and resisted the urge to pull at his hair.

Barely.

"He can't stay in the hospital, not when he's _not_ half-dead--the medics would have my hide because they _need_ the beds. And we can't put him in the cells again," Angeal said, making a face. "Those cells are not_ nearly_ secure enough to keep assassins _out_. They just weren't made for it and Hel's realm, they might actually have been built to encourage the bastards sneaking in and taking care of problems that way. And we still have _no_ idea who tried to kill him or how they got to his food, and _just_ his food, to poison it. I swear, I almost wish everyone in that block had been poisoned, because at least then it wouldn't be so glaring obvious how big the security hole we've got is. Since it's a big question mark other than 'someone who hated him a whole fucking lot,' he needs to be under _protective_ custody more than in custody."

It was a lot worse than he'd said, honestly--the cells in the back, where Gong-gil and Nok-su had been held, were top secret. No Chochungese allowed...which was part of why the security breach was so worrying; no one who wanted Gong-gil dead should have known where he _was_. It had just been him and Jang Nok-su, people found in the courtyard, with the king, and only people who had seemed important--clothing told rank, and Gong-gil's outfit had been so different from everyone else's that he had been stuck back there.

Gong-gil was lucky he'd been in red and white, not blue: nearly everyone in blue--the royalty and noble advisers--had been killed...and not all of them in "the Fall of Daerimmun," as they were calling it in the press.

"House arrest, sir?" Park suggested. "Confine him to a room in the palace and leave an armed guard with him at all times. After all of the ninja attacks in the early years of the war, we _are_ prepared for assassins, especially the younger recruits because it's become part of standard training. And we should put him on ShinRa rations, which are only prepared and handled by ShinRa personnel now, would make it harder for someone to poison him again."

"...This is why you should be in charge and not me," Angeal said, looking up at Park with a self-depreciating smile. He wondered just how it was Park managed to stay on his feet all the time and never looked tired, when he himself wanted to just curl up in bed and sleep for a long, long time.

He also occasionally wondered if Park was actually a robot. Given ShinRa, one never _really_ knew.

"That would require going through the SOLDIER training, sir," Park said flatly.

Angeal frowned slightly. "Why didn't you? I can't see any reason they wouldn't've let you in."

"Maybe, but I'm still Chochungese, sir," Park said flatly, and Angeal remembered about how the Chochungese, for all they knew a thousand bloody ways _around_ materia and how to thwart its effects, never actually _used_ it. The Wutai in general didn't use materia quite as much or in the same ways as they did on the other continents, but in Chochung, they honestly never used it at _all_, not even healing materia, even though they had huge stockpiles of it. That aversion, he realized, probably ran to mako as well, and that would make becoming a SOLDIER pretty much impossible.

Damn shame, though, Angeal thought. Park probably would have made 1st class so fast everyone's head would have spun, as disciplined as he was. Regular troopers didn't climb the ranks as quickly as SOLDIERs, and Angeal wasn't so naïve as to think that Park being Wutai _hadn't_ worked against him, either. The fact that he was where he was spoke volumes--he may have started out as a translator for the Chochung campaign, but he'd gone well past that role in the year he'd been working under Angeal, especially now.

And Angeal didn't quite know the best way to respond to what Park had just said, so he sighed again and went back to pondering the problem of what to do with Gong-gil. Park's solution seemed like the best one, the more he thought about it. "All right. Find me a room in the castle that's easily secured, then, and see about getting it fitted up with whatever it needs. How long should that take?"

"A day or two, maybe up to a week depending on supplies on hand."

"I want it in three days on the outside. You have my permission to yank a few people from Sgt. Glaston if need be. Until it's done, _he_ stays in the medical wing and _I_ do my able best to avoid Constantin."

"Yes, sir."

"I also want shifts guarding him. One guard at a time should be enough, six hour shifts. I want a limit of how many people come into contact with him, and you know why," Angeal said, tightening his lips. He couldn't let himself forget, at any time, that it was very possible Gong-gil would have to be killed. It was messy enough with him having to have to go into the medical ward, and Angeal was trying to contain this as much as he could, especially since they had no idea where the security breach was.

"Yes, sir."

"...Anything I left out?"

"I don't believe so, no, sir."

"OK, then. Delegate as you see fit, and if anything pops up, let me know instantly."

"Yes, sir."

"And if you can think of any way to question him that will get me some useful information, I'm all ears."

Park blinked and Angeal put his face back in his hands at the thought of the impossibility of it all. Right now trying to get information was like beating his head against a brick wall--Gong-gil had to have at least some idea who would have tried to kill him and why, but unlike everyone else who just _wouldn't_ talk, he _couldn't_ talk. And if he'd been a street performer, he was bound to be illiterate and there was no possible way he could _write_, so they couldn't even question him that way. It was insane.

"This is why I hate being in charge," Angeal groaned. "And you're dismissed. Report back to me when you've got arrangements made or if you find out anything useful from any one or those records."

Park nodded sharply, and with a crisp salute, said "Sir, yes, sir," then turned like he was on parade duty and walked out.

...Robot, Angeal thought. Had to be.

\--

Park put the scroll down and rubbed his eyes tiredly. He'd been reading through the rather dry and boring records of court for the last three hours, and his head was starting to hurt from it. The court documents weren't written in the vernacular Chochungese _eonmon_ letters, but in classical Wutai. He'd studied classical Wutai, his mother had insisted because some part of her had always wanted to go _home_, but until this investigation it had been a long time since he'd had to read classical. His mother would probably be furious, that this was so difficult for him.

Orders were orders, and so he pushed thoughts of his parents away quickly and slogged his way through it, wishing they had just written everything in eonmon. At least that was actually Chochungese, not bloody Northern.

And adding to the headache, Park didn't even know what he was looking for. Knowing would have helped, greatly. He felt like he was trying to find a needle in a haystack, digging through records of court to find anything that would help them understand why someone had tried to kill Gong-gil. He didn't know what he was looking for, or even the full reasons _why_ this was so important--or rather, not why this was so important to General Hewley, other than that the general was a better man than most.

He knew why he was up late, squinting at brush strokes of _ouja_ characters--orders, and because he suspected the five former advisers to the king had something to do with what was happening. Or, at the very least, they were willing to turn a blind eye to attempted murder. Seong had been too quick to jump to Gong-gil when he had asked for information about the play and the death of the dowager. And Yu had been too quick to blame Gong-gil for the king's madness. Too quick and too _angry_.

But _they_ had betrayed the king; how could they be that angry at a clown when _they_ had been the ones to defy what they would have seen as the mandate of the Heavens and--

_Unless they blamed Gong-gil for having to do so_, he realized suddenly, the realization making his eyes go round. _Unless they felt like the king's madness was pushing the country to the breaking point, and they blamed Gong-gil for driving the king mad and forcing their hand. It would be easier to blame a street performer they would have considered trash anyway than to blame the king and themselves. _

It made a twisted kind of sense, but he had no _proof_.

Not yet, anyway.

He frowned, and rolled up the scroll he had been working through, and reached instead for the ones dated around when the Dowager had died. He would trace back later. For now, the key seemed to be the time around the play.

He also figured he needed more of the damnable scrolls. Seong had given him enough to keep him busy for more than long enough, but he needed back to when Gong-gil had come to the castle. Gong-gil being there didn't even make any sense; he knew enough from his parents and their old-fashioned ideas to know that players of _any_ sort shouldn't even have been in the castle in the first place.

He was going to have to talk to the advisers again, and he couldn't help a tiny smile growing on his face. He knew how to play this game. He would give them all the rope they needed and wait, and then watch as they hung themselves.

\--

"Sir!"

Angeal turned around, slightly surprised at a voice coming from behind him. "Yeah?"

Park saluted sharply. "You said to report to you when arrangements for Gong-gil were finished. They're done, sir."

Angeal nodded, glad at least one thing was done. "Just a sec," he said, nodding once to Park, then turned back and cupped his hands at his mouth. "All right, decent job, you lazy assholes! Keep that up and maybe I won't have to send you all home to your mamas!" he yelled at the troopers at work in front of him. "Sergeant, don't cut them any slack! I want to see the outer walls completely rebuilt and insurgent-proof in two days! I went and took half of 'em out yesterday, so don't let my hard work be for nothing!"

"Yes sir!" the sergeant yelled sharply with a faint grin. "Guess that gives _you_ two days to get the other half you missed so they don't wreck our hard work, sir!"

Angeal laughed. "You bastards are never satisfied. I bust a ball taking out half the insurgents in Daerimmun in one mission and you stay-at-home slackers bust the other one for not taking out the other half!"

"Of course, sir! Man's gotta have a matched set!" the sergeant said with full-on grin and Angeal laughed harder.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'd _hate_ to be unbalanced," he said, laughing and rolling his eyes good-naturedly before turning to Park. Who was standing there without expression; same expression as he had when he'd come over and that he always had, although there was something about the absolutely blandness in Park's expression that made him wonder what was going through his head. He tried to imagine Park joking with him--or anyone--the way Sergeant Glaston did, and that made something in his brain twitch and his hand almost reflexively reach for a Remedy to throw. He caught himself before he really did reach for it, and had to fight a chuckle.

"Sir?"

"...Nothing, nothing," he said, giving up on keeping the grin off his face. "So you were saying the holding cell for Gong-gil is done?"

Park nodded. "Guard duty for him has also been added to the duty roster, sir."

"Good. Let me take a look at the room, then we'll put him there. Constantin will be glad to get the bed; he's been bitching for days now. Especially after the day before yesterday," he said, growing serious. The insurgents were getting bolder in their desperation and not just in Chochung, going by what Sephiroth and Genesis were telling him--he honestly was beginning to wonder how long before they started attacking Midgar itself.

He had his hands full here and it was getting worse and worse. The day before yesterday insurgents had bombed the outer wall; yesterday he, another SOLDIER and small group of troopers had taken out almost all of their hideout. The Chochungese had thought they'd won a coup in that attack, only losing a few men besides the suiciders; they hadn't realized three of their men had been tagged with tracking devices. Angeal considered it a strategic loss; the outer walls could be rebuilt and the chances of the inner walls being breached were slim to none, not with as many troopers and SOLDIERS he had, and with as much Chochungese healing materia as they had now--the Chochungese Esunas could cure a lot of the nastier poisons, and the Remedies they were getting now from Junon and Midgar had incorporated a lot of antidotes to the Wutai bugs and toxins as well--they were getting to a point where they could Cure pretty much everything the Chochungese threw at them. The more materia they shipped back to Midgar the better the materia and Remedies they got back from the scientists were, so Angeal was doing his able best to make sure the healing materia got shipped out first. ShinRa could destroy things well enough on their own, but Angeal was determined to do what he could to make sure as many men came back from missions as they could.

"Follow me, sir," Park said with a sharp nod of his head, and only turned to lead Angeal when Angeal answered it with a nod of his own.

\--

The room looked completely secure--Glaston's corp were good, and Angeal couldn't find a single kink even with his enhanced senses. "Perfect," he said, nodding. The room had been wired for electricity, and there was a key pad, meaning access would be limited only to those with a code. It still had a traditional paper door, but you'd be hard pressed to get to that door with the security in front of it. Windows, likewise, had glowing panels around them indicating a security force field; no one was getting in or out through them. There was a pad on the inside of the door as well, but that had an optical scanner on it, meaning the only way to get out if the security shields were up was a retinal scan.

Glaston definitely knew what he was doing, for his engineers to have done all this within his three day limit.

"Let's go pick up her new inhabitant, shall we?" Angeal said, and Park saluted.

\--

"Here to take a perfectly healthy prisoner off your hands," Angeal said as soon as he saw Constantin.

"It's about time," Constantin said, putting his hands on his hips in mock-irritation. "And I trust we won't be seeing him in here again?"

"Not unless he catches a cold," Angeal said with a nod.

"Good," Constantin said, smiling faintly. "I've finally got him completely in one piece and healthy; keep him that way."

"Sir, yes sir!" Angeal said and gave Constantin a salute.

Park just stared at them, but his lips twitched, and Angeal couldn't help smile at that--so Park was human after all.

"This way," Constantin said, and lead them towards the back, to the high security parts of the medical facilities, chatting as he did. "I'm sure he'll be glad to be getting out of here, even if he is going back to cells. A medical ward is a pretty boring place when you're healthy. Did try to keep him busy, though--we gave him some spoken VSSL lesson files, and he's been listening to that. He can't speak, but at least he's getting better at understanding Visgradian when he hears it. And you should have seen him when we were showing him how to work the DM player," he said, shaking his head, and Angeal could just imagine.

Gong-gil was sitting cross-legged on his bed, his eyes closed and earbuds in, mouthing something. Angeal figured that to be the lessons files of Visgradian Standard Constantin had mentioned. It was almost strange, to see Gong-gil _healthy_. He didn't have that close-to-death pallor he'd had before, and it looked like he'd started to put on some of the weight he had to have lost being sick.

He was still too pretty by half, and still had that young, fragile look to him. And he _still_ looked like he'd break if you touched him, like the healthy look was just temporary.

Gong-gil frowned then fumbled with the digital media player then opened his eyes to hit a button on it, and noticed Angeal and Park. His eyes went wide and he quickly pulled the earbuds out and shifted how he was sitting and bowed.

Angeal nodded his head and motioned for Park. "Just in case," he said, and then turned to Gong-gil, who was watching the both of them with large, round eyes. Gong-gil licked his lip nervously, and Angeal's eyes followed the movement before he sighed. "We're moving you," he said, and Park translated it immediately. "We've got a new, secure--"

For some reason "cell" twisted in his mouth and wouldn't come out, and he faltered slightly. "We've got a new, secure place to put you. That's why we left you here, because we needed to get everything ready."

Gong-gil managed to look more nervous, and somehow overwhelmed. He gestured randomly at the DM player then looked at Angeal hopefully, picking it up and clutching it tightly.

Angeal smiled faintly. "Yeah, you can take it with you. So follow me," he said, and Gong-gil nodded, and Angeal wondered where under the Heavens the urge to reassure the man had come from, but it was there, and it was strong. "Everything will be all right, I promise."

Park hesitated for a fraction of a moment before he translated that, and Angeal decided not to pay it any mind. He was more caught up in the tiny flare of something--he didn't know what, but it seemed like a good thing--he saw in Gong-gil's tired, terrified eyes, the way it seemed like Gong-gil _wanted_ to trust him. Gong-gil had understood that much of everything Angeal had said, even before Park had translated it, he was sure, and he was glad for that much, that his reassurances got through.

Angeal wanted Gong-gil to trust him, but damned, like everything about Gong-gil, if he knew _why_.

Instead of thinking about any of this, he gestured with his hand, and with a nod of thanks to Constantin, headed out of the medical area.

\--

That fragile trust got a quick test, when Gong-gil realized they were leading him into the castle proper. It was obvious he had not expected to be brought back here, and equally obvious that he didn't like this at all, not with the way he was shrinking in on himself and his eyes were darting around.

Angeal finally stopped and faced down Gong-gil, and fuck, if it didn't hurt to see someone looking that _scared_.

What in Hel's name had happened to him?

"Look," he said, not knowing exactly what he wanted to say. "Whatever happened here, it's done with. And right now, I'm--we're--going to do everything we can to keep you safe."

Gong-gil's eyes narrowed, but he still said nothing.

"You have to know," Angeal said, crossing his arms, "that you aren't safe in the cells. So I'm putting you in the castle, which is now a ShinRa base, and having you guarded here. I don't think you want to get poisoned again, do you? Or whatever other nasty someone with a grudge might be planning."

Gong-gil blinked, then slowly shook his head after Park translated it.

"Right. So you're back in the palace until this all gets sorted out," he said, and dropped his arms, then gave Gong-gil a faint smile. "Though you will have to deal with ShinRa rations. You might prefer the prison after you try those," he said, and he was pretty damned sure it was a smile that Gong-gil had just covered with his sleeve.

\--

Once they got to the reinforced room, Angeal laid down the rules. "You are not," he said sternly, crossing his arms and frowning, "allowed to go where you want. You stay in this room and _only_ in this room. We'll let you out for an hour, same as they did when you were in the cell, just a different hour from everyone else until I figure out who it was that was trying to kill you. If you want anything...aw, Hel's realm," Angeal said, groaning. The way he had planned to finish that sentence was not going to work, because Gong-gil couldn't exactly _ask_ for something. "I really wish you could talk. Or at least _write_."

Park hadn't translated that last part, but to Angeal's immediate surprise, Gong-gil straightened up and did a gesture with his hand, as if he was writing, and nodded.

It took a minute to register, but when it did... "Can you _write_?"

Gong-gil nodded, shyly, and for the first time, Angeal felt like something in the whole cluster fuck was actually working out his way--if Gong-gil could _write_, then they could get statements from him and question him.

Gong-gil opened his mouth like he was going to say something, but shut it and his shoulders slumped. Angeal frowned, not having a clue why Gong-gil suddenly looked dejected.

He was surprised again when Park said something in Chochungese. Gong-gil shook his head no. Park asked a few more questions, getting a nod or a head shake, and Angeal just stood there wishing he'd had some kind of ear for the language.

Finally, Park looked over at Angeal. "He can't write Standard," he said. "He only knows the Chochungese _eonmon_ letters."

Angeal groaned. "Fabulous."

The easiest thing to do, he thought, would be to make Park Gong-gil's babysitter, but that was a definite no-go--Angeal needed Park too much right then. "Is there anyone _besides_ you who can read Chochungese enough to read simple requests?"

"Probably, sir. Some of the troops have been in Chochung two or three years now, and more than a few, I'm sure, have learned enough Chochungese to manage. I've given lessons to three or four people," Park said slowly, as if thinking, "and two of them definitely have enough for this."

...Lessons? If Park was giving people Chochungese lessons, he was finding a way to pencil his commanding officer in, because Angeal had had it. Later, though. "OK. Find me some that can read. He," he said, indicating Gong-gil, "can at least understand Standard if it's not that complex, seems like, and I can get them an electronic dictionary or something."

"Yes, sir," Park said with a sharp nod.

Gong-gil was looking at his feet, his shoulders hunched in and Angeal fought the urge to pat the guy on the head. "Don't look like that, this isn't your fault," Angeal said, one corner of his mouth quirking up. "Even though you _are_ kind of a pain in the ass right now. But you'd be a _bigger_ pain in the ass for me if someone managed to kill you. So no getting killed, got it?" he said, mock-seriously.

To his surprise, Gong-gil looked up at him, and a tiny, breathtaking smile touched his lips for a moment, so quickly Angeal almost wondered if he'd imagined it, and Gong-gil nodded.

"Is there anything you want to keep you busy, besides the DM player and Standard lessons? Ask now, while there's someone who can read what you want in the room, because it might be a while before we get guards who can lined up."

Gong-gil frowned slightly, thinking out what Angeal had just said. Angeal was about ten seconds away from telling Park to translate when there was a flash of understanding behind Gong-gil's eyes, and after a few moments of thought, he nodded.

"Park, I know you have paper and a pencil because you're you," Angeal said, raising an eyebrow, and true enough, Park pulled out a small notebook and pen.

Gong-gil stared at the pen as if he'd never seen one before. Park said something to him, and Gong-gil got a disbelieving look on his face, but gamely took the pen and paper. He stared at the pen in confusion again, and Park reached over, took off the top, and said something to him in Chochungese. That was when Angeal realized Gong-gil had never used a pen before, and by the _gods_, was this place ever fucking _backwards_.

Gong-gil sat himself down primly right on the floor, kneeling, and held the pen like a brush as he wrote out whatever it was he wanted. When he was done, he read over it again, frowned and added one more thing, then stood up and gave it back to Park with a bow. Park looked over it, frowning, as if he had no idea what under the heavens Gong-gil wanted.

"What's he want?" Angeal said, curious as to what could make Park blink at something twice.

"I'm not exactly sure, sir," he said, and then rattled off something quickly at Gong-gil. Gong-gil raised his hand and mimicked putting something over it, then moved his hand around in a way that Angeal couldn't even begin to fathom.

Park seemed to get it, though. He said a word in Chochungese, and Gong-gil nodded.

"He...wants materials to make a puppet, sir."

Angeal just blinked. A _puppet_? He wanted to make a _puppet_?! "Anything dangerous on that list?"

"Just scissors."

He frowned slightly. "As long as they aren't kept in the room and he's supervised, it should be alright," Angeal said, nodding.

Gong-gil's face lit up at Angeal's nod, and it was beautiful in a way completely different from the beauty of when he had been half-dead and sick, but oddly it made him seem just as fragile, like a bubble.

...Yeah. No more using metaphors for him, Angeal thought wryly. They just never worked out for him, after all.

\--

Park sighed and put the scroll he was looking at down, his eyes tired. He'd been at this all day--the general was out on a mission, and Park wanted to have _something_ for him when he came back. And it had started out a welcome distraction--everyone was on edge, when the SOLDIERs--when General Hewley--left on a mission. While death was always possible at any time, missions were nerve-wracking because there was a lot more danger, especially the ones requiring SOLDIERs, and even more so for the ones involving the general. The general was amazing, far beyond their level, and sure to be all right, but there was always the chance of something happening, of the unexpected, and on some level, everyone on base was nervous, even if they covered it with certain bravado about how many 'dead wonks' the general would 'score.'

Talk like that tended to go dead if people noticed Park around--a lot of talk did, but that even more so--and there would occasionally be an awkward, "but you're not a wonk, you're not like these wutes, you're all right," and a necessary acknowledgement and reassurance to the one who had spoken, and it was uncomfortable all around--only he wasn't allowed to show it, not for the sake of solidarity, even if in his mind he imagined how it would feel to simply haul off and punch out whoever said it. The facade of being all right with things and tapping down tightly on his anger was tiring and stressful, and so it was easier for him to be elsewhere and spend his time being _productive_ instead of glancing up every time the main gates squeaked or someone came looking like they had news, like half the men seemed to be. The general was doing his job as only he could; Park would do the same.

...It was a good distraction, if nothing else. Which was why Park had been closed up in a room full of scrolls, a notebook, a pen, and a few ration bars for the last five hours.

The little bits and pieces he was getting were beginning to make a picture. Park had a pretty good idea that things were being left out--a lot of things--but there was enough in the records that things were beginning to pull together.

Gong-gil had come with a troupe of five. Or rather, had been arrested for impinging the honor of the king and found themselves before the king, they had performed and apparently done well, because by royal decree, spaces were made for the troupe at the palace, something that was absolutely mind-boggling, given how Chochung was. Park had heard, of course, like everyone, that Yeonsan-gun was not exactly sane and how he lived as if there were no war dragging on outside his castle walls, but the records, as abridged and dry as they were, did show a pattern of the man's erraticism...erraticism that seemed to grow as time went on.

And saying "erraticism," he thought, was being _kind_. There had been one mention of a royal decree punishing an advisor by having him stripped of his title and lands and his hands cut off, for accepting bribes for positions. He didn't know enough about Chochung to know if something as barbaric as that was customary, but something sat badly with him over it--likely because of the situation with his own parents, how they had been exiled for his father's fascination with the world outside of Chochung...or rather, his desire to bring Chochung into the modern era somehow. He didn't know the details; it had all happened before he was born, but just from what his father had said, the few times he spoke about it, that exile had been a set punishment, not the vagaries of mere _whim_. There did seem to be opposition; other records indicated dissension with decrees and attempts--failed attempts--to sway the king.

Add to that that Park had no idea why he had been given some of these records. These were supposed to be ones relating to Gong-gil, and yet the one he had just read had no mention of him...other than an oblique reference to a performance. Which told him nothing at all.

He sighed heavily, certainty settling like a leaden weight in his stomach. He didn't know enough about the laws of Chochung to understand what was going on, and that meant he was going to have to talk to someone who _did_.

\--

"_Ahh, young lieutenant Park_," Seong said, smiling a smile so fake a part of Park imagined shooting it off the man...along with half his face. He didn't show it on his face. Let the man have his false smiles; all Park wanted was information. "_Is there something I can help you with_?"

"_Yes, and I thank you for your trouble. I'm curious_," he said, making sure to for once use a more polite way of speaking, even though it grated. "_About why I was given some of these scrolls. They don't seem to relate to Gong-gil_."

"_All of those_," Seong said, "_happened directly because of Gong-gil_."

"_The performance troupe coming to live in the palace_?"

"_The head of the troupe made a boast they could make the king laugh. If they did, they would be allowed to live. If not, they would die. It was Gong-gil who made the king laugh, in a vulgar display beneath what his royal majesty should ever have been exposed to_. "

"_The man having his hands chopped off_?"

"_A performance of Gong-gil and his troupe. They mocked the ministers that day, with a bawdy play about a minister taking money for posts. The king rather enjoyed it...especially Gong-gil dressed as a young noble woman, plying the minister with sexual favors_," he said, looking disgusted.

"_Is that a normal punishment_?"

Seong's jaw tensed. "_The departed king cared little for rule of law or procedures. And as he grew more enamored with Gong-gil, the more erratic he became. And the more arbitrary and deadly his punishments became_."

"_The dowager, two courtesans and the ministers_," Park said flatly. The dowager's heart attack and the courtesans stabbed to death during a play he'd learned about already. The ministers had been killed after, shot with arrows during a mounted 'hunt'...a 'hunt' to celebrate Gong-gil's being given a title.

There was a lot of death around Gong-gil, and that only what was in the records.

"_Gong-gil is dangerous_," Seong snarled. "_There is nothing but death around him, the death of those who would have somehow been in his way. As he gained the king's favor, the more brutal the methods of removing objectors of any stripe became_." Seong smiled suddenly, and it wasn't a nice smile. "_Even his former troupe_."

That didn't sound very good at all, Park thought, and he smiled his own fake smile and bowed deeply enough to throw Seong a bone, thanked him for his trouble, and left.

It seemed he had a lot more reading to do.

\--

So there was reading, and a lot more of it. He was about ready to give up for the day, see if there was any news about the general, when what he was looking at registered.

Park stared at the scroll, almost not believing what he was reading. There was no way that... He read through the scroll carefully, then read it again to verify that it said what he thought it did. There was no doubt, no mistake, and this opened a whole _new_ set of problems.

His PHS rang. "Park here," he said once he got it up to his ear, his brain still spinning as what the information on that scroll _meant_ began to sink in.

"Yo," a laughing voice said back.

"I'm _working_," Park said sharply. "And on things you don't have the clearance to know about, so don't ask."

"Yeah, yeah, rub it in some more that you shot past all of us," Banks, a trooper he had been friends with since boot camp and well into the Chochung offensive and who always seemed determined to drag him out somewhere, said laughing. "And I'll let you go, O Busy One. Guess you _didn't_ want to know the general got back about an hour ago."

"He _what_?" Park said in surprise, because usually he was on the ball enough to know something like that faster.

"You're slacking, man," Banks said, and laughed, and kept on laughing as Park hung up on him after a hurried, "Later."

He couldn't bother the general with this _now_, not with the general only just back and Park himself unprepared, but he'd go let the general know he needed to talk to him tomorrow, and would spend tonight prepping everything and trying to do something about the Blizzard currently forming in his stomach as he looked down at the records, at the king's order for a player, Jang-saeng, to be put to death.

"_There is nothing but death around him_," Seong had said. "_Even his former troupe_."

Put to death for committing to a crime Gong-gil had been originally accused of.

Park was not a superstitious man and even as a child had had little use for the tales his mother used to tell him, but he couldn't help not liking the way things seemed to _happen_ around Gong-gil--or the way people seemed to go to extreme lengths for him, either in love or hatred, because even through the dry lines of simple facts in the scrolls, there had been _both_ involved with this defamation affair--at _all_.

He knew what his mother would say about it, what name she would have. And while he'd never believed in _juin_ before, in those whose very existence was said to be a curse, he couldn't deny that the patterns here were making him cold. He was beginning to wish that the general had simply eliminated Gong-gil instead of being the good man that he was and trying to help him.

And it was times like this that Park realized that he himself was not much of a good man at all.

\--

"...You're shitting me," Angeal said flatly the next day. It took him a while to manage to say even that; what had happened first was the pen he was using to fill out paperwork fell out of his hand and hit the floor, then rolled away somewhere. Now all he could manage was to stare at Park and blink, because that, what Park had just told him, that made no fucking sense at all.

"I am not, sir," Park said, serious as always. "Gong-gil was accused of defaming the king. And his troupe was brought in originally," he said, opening the file of printed out translations and pulling out the page, "for impersonating the king in an inappropriate manner in performances."

Angeal had a very, very hard time reconciling the man he'd met in the cells with someone with the--well, the balls, to be blunt, to do something like that. But what it did do was complicate things--a _lot_. Because if it were true, on the one hand it meant Gong-gil was probably off the hook for getting killed by ShinRa--Angeal would somehow finagle something to make it clear Gong-gil was on their side, even if it took a bit of creativity, but on the other, it meant that if that was why someone had tried to kill Gong-gil, it definitely related somehow to the king, and they very well might have a fledgeling movement inside the castle. And if it wasn't true, then it meant someone had had it out for Gong-gil for a long, long time, and was willing to do whatever it took to kill him, and being thwarted this many times meant they would get desperate. And they probably nursed that big of a grudge because of Gong-gil's relation to the king, and that left Angeal with an entirely different set of problems. Or rather, an answer to a 'problem' he didn't much like at all. "What happened with the accusations of defamation? What was the 'defamation'?"

"The defamation was of the king's alleged 'debauchery'," Park said, flipping through the papers to find another translation, and Angeal could read enough through _those_ lines. "As for the accusations, the handwriting was a perfect match, according to the records. But it _was_ also a match for the head of the troupe, a Jang-saeng. He confessed, saying that he taught Gong-gil to write, and that was why their letters were the same."

"But...?" Angeal said, knowing a 'but' had to be coming. It was open and shut, an accusation, a confession, case closed, so open and shut that Park wouldn't have brought this to him this urgently unless there was something else.

"But no one knows where the evidence came from. Or rather, where Jang Nok-su got it," Park said flatly, and that right there was the biggest 'but' Angeal had ever heard in his _life_.

\--

Angeal had not liked Jang Nok-su the first time he met her, nor had he liked her the second time, and the third time was cementing his dislike of her completely.

Jang gave him a smile more smirk than anything else.

"That pathetic little fool didn't write them. _I_ had them done. I wanted the king to put Gong-gil to death. How was I to know that fool of a player he was with, Jang-saeng, could also write, and that their letters were identical? It was so much more believable for it to be _him_, and not that spineless _whore_ Gong-gil. But ah, Gong-gil is quite good at getting his defenders," she said, and there was something sickeningly sweet and poisonous in her words. And the smile she gave was a weapon; Angeal knew that much.

"You framed an innocent man?" Angeal said, frowning. "You were trying to get an innocent man killed?"

Her laugh was sharp. "Innocent? Gong-gil, _innocent_? There is nothing innocent about that power-hungry little bastard! He drove the king mad!"

"The Mad King of Chochung was plenty mad before he ever met Gong-gil!" Angeal yelled back. "We've been hearing rumors about him for quite a while now. He just finally sailed off the deep end enough for your own people to let us in."

"Traitors," she snarled. "Like your little pet translator."

"I think you want to leave my lieutenant out of this," Angeal said coldly, and Nok-su smirked.

"So you like the pretty Chochung boys, naa?" she said, raising her eyebrow knowingly. "Maybe I should warn your little translator, eh? 'Be careful, before Gong-gil worms his way in'."

"You will shut up now and answer my questions," Angeal said, narrowing his eyes. It had been a long time since he had been this angry, but by the gods, he was getting there. "So you framed Gong-gil."

That smirk was back. "Yes," she said, nose in the air.

It was almost a shock at how quickly her affirmative had come, but then, Angeal figured, she probably knew she had nothing left to lose. Something else nagged at him--she had been willing a send an innocent man to his death; what had happened when the _wrong_ innocent man took the blame?

He'd always been good with names, and a few years in Chochung meant the names are a little easier to tug out. "What happened to...Jang-saeng?" Angeal asked, his voice low and filled with a barely kept in check anger.

Jang Nok-su sniffed. "He brought it on himself."

"What happened to Jang-saeng?" Angeal said again, and the only one in the room who didn't flinch was the one person who should have.

Nok-su looked away haughtily. "He was sentenced to death. But somehow he escaped his cell and instead of fleeing, as anyone with the sense to protect their own skins did, he came back to the castle and taunted the king with vile slander, of the king 'playing' with boys now." She sniffed again. "Jealousy is a terrible thing. And only goes to show how powerful Gong-gil's hold is over those who go mad for him."

She gave Angeal a patronizing smile, one that made him long to an almost disturbing degree to slap it off of her. "Be careful, dear general. Don't let him get his hooks into you as well. It's caused the death of everyone who has."

"Jang-saeng was killed?" he said slowly. He'd read the translation of the order to kill him that Park had given him, but... He didn't want it to be true. He didn't want to know an innocent man had died in a jealous woman's power plays.

"Oh, eventually," she said with a sick, pleased little smile. "When _your_ troops came, he died. It was your people who killed him. But before that, the king showed him great mercy."

Angeal didn't like her smile.

"The king _only_ had Jang-saeng's eyes put out. So that he could never see his beloved Gong-gil again. He'd _said_ he had nothing to lose when the king first ordered him killed, you see, and his majesty simply showed him that he had been _wrong_," she said sweetly, and Angeal felt sick.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Angeal wondered if maybe he was going a little mad as well.

_He was wandering in the forest, completely lost. He had no idea where he was, not at first, but it didn't take long to realize he was in the Great Forest. Or something like it, there was something wrong. The forest was full of wisps, of blue sparks like fireflies that skittered away if he drew near._

_Something was burning. He looked southwards, and could see smoke, a lot of it in the distance, and he could almost hear screams. He headed towards it, and there was a burning village. Or what had been a burning village; now there was nothing but wreckage and ruin and bodies._

_...bodies that were rising to their feet and screaming. They were the ones whose screams he had heard, only now the screams were wrong, hoarse, broken, ripping out through charred flesh. And they were pointing at him, and screaming, over and over._

_He scrambled back, wanting to get away from this burned place, and ran back into the Forest. But the ground was rumbling, rising, and people--corpses--were coalescing into being from the tiny blue wisps that had fled from him before. There were screams and weeping in the air, and all of it seemed aimed at him. He tried to get away but they were everywhere, and in desperation he reached for his sword, but it was gone._

_His sword was gone, and he was surrounded by weeping and screaming corpses and breathing in the stench of burning buildings and flesh._

_He ran. He ran deeper into the woods, but had no idea where he was going, which way was out, and there was no escape._

_And the deeper into the forest he ran, the more he felt himself changing, changing into something, something monstrous. There were men, men with guns, shooting at him from the trees, and he leapt for them, claws ripping them apart. Deeper into the forest he ran, deeper and deeper, feeling now the fleshy ground beneath his claws, the weight of wing that, once clear, would let him rise about the forest and seek out--_

_There was a flash of something off to the side, a slip of white and red. He looked over and saw it again; someone slipping through the trees. They stopped and looked back at him, and Angeal recognized him instantly. _

_"Gong-gil?" he asked, his voice a roiling roar. _

_Gong-gil's mouth moved, as if he was speaking, but no sound came out. He gestured once, motioning Angeal to follow, then he slipped into the forest, and Angeal ran. And as he ran, as he followed, the ground changed, the feeling changed, from fleshy ground to solid, and he felt lighter, the weight of claw and wing fading, but he barely noticed, his eyes locked on the flashes of red and white._

_He followed. _

_He followed until he caught Gong-gil, who was standing in a cleared circle. Angeal's sword was in the circle, in the middle, stuck into the ground as if a marker. Gong-gil stood in front of it, and gestured again. He made his way to them, suddenly feeling the blood on his hands and the way smoke and ash clung to his hair._

_"I can't," he whispered, and Gong-gil smiled, a smile so breathtaking that something in Angeal lightened, almost felt like--_

_He took a step forward, and Gong-gil reached out a hand._

_"NO!" a voice roared, and an arrow shot out. Angeal moved but not fast enough, it struck him hard in the shoulder, and instead of blood there were feathers, feathers white as Chímaira's, and Angeal screamed as a wing ripped itself out. "You can't have him! He's mine!" _

_Another arrow, another shot to his back, but this was a graze, and the wing that ripped itself free was smaller, but still as white as an abomination._

_The archer came out, and there was madness there. Madness upon that dead face, and Gong-gil fled._

_"Give me back my Gong-gil," the dead king yelled. "He's mine! Mine! You can't have him! Kill him and give him back!" _

_The dead king raised his bow again, and with his next shot, Angeal became a monster once more._

Angeal woke up with a start, his heart beating too fast. It took him a minute to remember where he was; that he was not fighting in the middle of the Great Forest, surrounded by _corpses_ and with a possessive insane and very much _dead_ king trying to kill him.

And that he was _human_.

He shut his eyes and rubbed his face desperately with his hand, as if trying to wipe even the memory of that nightmare out of his mind. He didn't want to go back to sleep--the thought of sleep and even more nightmares made him want to gut himself with his own sword. So instead he rose and made his way to his desk, and turned on his lamp and began to read through everything he Park had given him so far on Gong-gil again, to piece together what had happened and what his relationship had been to the king and seeing if he had missed anything. To piece together if he would have to order Gong-gil to become 'a casualty of the fall of the castle.' To--

There was a flash, again, in his mind of Gong-gil in his cell, wan and broken; a flash of those bandaged wrists and something in his gut _twisted_ at that, and in his head, he could hear the dead mad king from his nightmares screaming "_He's mine_!" over and over again, and Angeal wondered if maybe he was going a little mad as well.

\--

Madness, he decided about ten minutes later, was the only way to explain what he was doing now. Namely, walking down the halls in the dark--because this place was forsaken-by-the-gods backwards and had no electricity, and while they'd wired the place some, there wasn't enough juice available to run everything--at 3 in the morning, and security force fields took precedence over lights.

So he was walking in the dark at 3 am.

Straight towards Gong-gil's room...cell...room...whatever.

He was just going for a walk. A walk to clear his head. Just a _walk_. To clear his head. So he could think and to get the nightmare that hadn't let him concentrate out of his head. Just a walk.

A walk that would take him right past Gong-gil's room.

_You've_ lost _it, Hewley_, he thought to himself, but that didn't stop him from heading that direction. He couldn't really explain even to himself what he was doing, other than being unsettled at that dream. He had no intention of going into Gong-gil's room...it was almost as if just walking past it would be enough. Enough for _what_, he had no idea. He felt stupid, as if he was still a little kid sneaking into his mother's room after nightmares about monsters gobbling her up. He wasn't seven years old and there were no dead zombie kings trying to eat Gong-gil's head and shoot Angeal full of arrows to turn him into a monster.

He'd _honestly_ had no intention at all of going in.

Not until he heard the sounds of a struggle happening inside.

The sounds were so faint someone who _wasn't_ SOLDIER probably wouldn't have heard them at all...same way as the almost pitch-black hallway would have been almost impossible to navigate. But just as Angeal didn't have any problems seeing, he sure as Shiva had _no_ problems hearing the sounds of muffled, panicked struggles happening behind paper doors and the low hum of a security field.

Given that _one_ attempt had been made on Gong-gil's life already, Angeal didn't even hesitate and had punched in the deactivate code for the security shields at top speed, then flung the door open.

He'd been expecting to see a number of things, but what he actually saw left him so stunned it actually took a moment for it to sink in. But when it did, everything pretty much turned into a reddish haze of _what the fuck is this shit_, and he was yelling before he even realized he'd drawn a breath to do so.

"What in _Hel's name_ is going on in here?!" Angeal yelled, his voice thunderous even to his own ears--he didn't yell often, but when he did, no one missed it.

Truthfully, he had a pretty good idea what the fuck was going on--Gong-gil in a shaking heap on the floor and half his clothes pulled off, and the trooper ordered to _guard_ Gong-gil scrambling away--but by the _gods_, he wanted an explanation. "Explain yourself, trooper!"

"Sir...I...sir!" Williams said snapping to attention and saluting futilely.

"I want an explanation, trooper! Your duty was to guard him!" Angeal yelled, and it was starting to turn into an almost white-hot rage as he got angrier and angrier. "Did you misunderstand your orders?! Answer me!" This was ridiculous. Absolutely _ridiculous_. The man had tried to kill himself once and the gods only knew why, someone had tried to kill him and damned near succeeded, and now the man Angeal had ordered to _guard the guy_ had tried to assault him--and it was pretty obvious there was _nothing_ mutual in the whole thing, not with the way Gong-gil had been struggling and the way he was _shaking_ now.

"Sir--it's not--!"

He had the trooper by the scruff of the neck before he even realized he had moved. "You! Follow me," he snapped at Gong-gil, and part of him winced inside at the way Gong-gil flinched, but Angeal was altogether _too fucking pissed _to really say anything then. Right now, the only thing that mattered was getting Trooper Williams into a gods-bedamned _cell_. "And as for you, you piece of shit, since you can't manage your orders properly, maybe the military isn't the place for you," he snarled. "You are hereby relieved of duty and arrested for assault. Say hello to a dishonorable discharge, and you're fucking lucky I don't _gut you right here_ and _save myself the fucking paperwork_!" he yelled, and was gratified to see the bastard flinch. Angeal shook him again just for good measure before he forcefully dragged the man out to the makeshift prison they had made the castle holds into. He got some shocked looks from the people on guard, who all snapped to attention the second they saw him. He ignored them and marched a babbling Williams straight into the cell in the back, where Gong-gil had once been but was now empty, and shoved him with little care to watch his own strength.

"Stew here overnight," Angeal snarled as the cell door slammed shut. "Because starting tomorrow, as soon as I file the paperwork, your military career is officially _over_."

"But sir, _please_, it's not what you--!"

He looked over his shoulder at Gong-gil, who was standing a good two meters behind him, his clothes still a mess and looking completely shell-shocked and shaking. "You, come with me. If I can't manage to trust the guards to watch you, it looks like I'll have to do it myself," he snarled, and tightened his hands into fists so he wouldn't put his fist through the wall, something about his expression causing Williams' "Sir, it's not what you think, I wasn't, sir!" babble to dry up, and Angeal turned on his heel to go.

There was a long moment of what surely had to be hesitation, but before he'd even made it to the doorway he heard the faint, hesitant sounds of Gong-gil's footfalls behind him, and for some reason, something in him almost relaxed.

Until Nok-su began to laugh. "The amazing Gong-gil; you lose your loyal Jang-saeng, you even lose the king, but you seem to have gained a _general_. You _do_ always end up protected, naa, Gong-gil?!" she screamed in Standard, and Angeal knew enough to damn well know who that had _really_ been aimed at.

\--

If he'd thought Gong-gil'd had a bad reaction to being brought into the castle, it was nothing compared to being brought into Angeal's quarters.

Gong-gil had followed him; probably, Angeal thought uncomfortably as his anger started to fade as they walked through the castle, because he was afraid not to. But when they got into his quarters, something poisonous flared for a moment in Gong-gil's eyes before they went dead and flat and Gong-gil became sullen, hunched in protectively and his face tight.

Angeal was not in a mood for it, for any more problems that night.

"You," he said sharply, and Gong-gil flinched at the tone. "Are here for tonight. And just tonight. You understand?"

Gong-gil nodded once, just as sharply, but in a brittle kind of way, and what in Hel's name--

All of a sudden, Angeal had a rather sick realization. His quarters were the _king's old chambers_.

No wonder Gong-gil didn't want to be here. Only the gods and Gong-gil knew what had gone on here, but Angeal would bet his materia that it hadn't been good.

_Fuck._

His shoulders slumped, and the last of his anger drained out. "Look," Angeal said faintly, not able to look a Gong-gil. "You aren't safe in the cells. You know that."

Gong-gil's lips tightened slightly as he worked out what Angeal had said, then slowly nodded his head.

"Right. So you're here for tonight until the morning guard is on shift. For right now, this room is the safest place in the entire castle that you could be," he said, and for that, he looked straight at Gong-gil, because it was the goddess' own truth. Anyone that tried to do any harm right now to Gong-gil would sincerely wish they hadn't.

Gong-gil never lost his tenseness, but he nodded, and dared only briefly to look at Angeal before he looked away. "So here you are. Oh, and don't even think about trying to sneak off, because you leave this room, and I will put you back in the regular cells, and we both know that will not go well for you," he said sternly, then felt like an ass when Gong-gil's eyes went large and he seemed to hunch in on himself even more. "Yeah," he said, his voice softer. "Neither one of us wants that, OK?" he said, and Gong-gil looked up at him again with those eyes, the ones that _wanted_ to trust but seemed afraid to. "Uh...you look like you need sleep," he said, latching on to something that was not the current conversation or situation, something normal and banal and...and not _this_. "You...you should get some," he said, scratching the back of his head, and glad to be on normal footing.

He could almost hear Genesis going, "That was _smooth_, Angeal" for _that_ one.

Gong-gil colored slightly, but nothing could hide the bags under his eyes and how he was swaying on his feet. The adrenalin rush was probably fading, and it was only about 3:30 in the morning. Angeal gestured towards a sofa that had been there from the beginning, and Gong-gil went towards it stiffly, and sat ramrod straight, while Angeal went off to find a blanket and pillow for the guy. And to get away from him, because this whole thing was crazy, the way his mouth went dry was crazy, and the way he wanted to do whatever it took to keep that tense, brittle look off of Gong-gil's face forever. He could understand all of this if it was something simple, like he wanted to screw the guy or something, but the thought of that made something else twist in him, in a _bad_ way, so he was pretty sure that was _not_ it, for all Gong-gil was the most beautiful person he'd ever met. He didn't want to sleep with the guy, he wanted--Hel's realm, he didn't know _what_ he wanted, as if the fact that he had gone out for a night stroll right past Gong-gil's room didn't tell him that much. All in all he was glad he had, but...what the fuck.

_I really have finally lost it_, he thought, then went, "A-HA!" as he found an extra pillow.

\--

Gong-gil finally fell asleep, curled up on the glorified sofa. He'd been wary as a cat, staring at Angeal the whole time like he expected Angeal to jump on him or something; all things considered, Angeal couldn't blame him one bit even though it stung, so he ignored him and went about doing everything he that _wouldn't_ get him accused of endangering security by having the king's former..._something_...in the room. He'd see about assigning a new second shift night guard tomorrow; for now Gong-gil could stay here, because only a fool would trying to break into Angeal's quarters.

He started the paperwork on Williams, filled out a few request forms for banal things such as higher-level Cure materia and rations since he was doing paperwork anyway, and finally wrote his mother a letter just for some semblance of something that _wasn't_ military, but normal, civilian life. Eventually, as Angeal busied himself with all that, Gong-gil's eyes had started to drift shut, and soon after he was fast asleep, the bags under his eyes like dark bruises.

Angeal looked over about an hour or so later, just as the night sky had started to lighten to his eyes but still well before dawn, and saw Gong-gil was asleep, but shivering. Angeal had given him a blanket, but it was getting late enough in the year to start becoming chilly at night, and yeah, _there_ was that "feeling like an ass" feeling that he was getting used to.

Angeal didn't figure he was going to get any sleep--it was only an hour or two before when he was supposed to be up anyway, so he got up, went to his own bedding, took the futon cover off of it, and headed over to Gong-gil.

He had gotten to about two feet away from Gong-gil before Gong-gil's eyes flew open and he went tense, clutching tightly at the thin blanket covering him.

Angeal winced. "Sorry. I didn't mean to wake you. I just thought you might be cold. Go back to sleep," he said, putting the cover over Gong-gil and then raising his hands to show he meant no harm and that bringing over a blanket was all he had meant to do. "Sorry. And good-night." He smiled ruefully, feeling like a heel and wondering how he had messed up trying to do something good and just what it is he was doing. "_An...annyong...annyeonghi jumu...ju_...I know this, I do...ha! _Annyeonghi jumushipsiyo_!" Angeal said, managing somehow to dredge out one of the few phrases in Chochung Wutai he had managed to learn and feeling stupid for having even tried to say it. Sephiroth could converse with the best of them on theories of war in Yamatan and Genesis could cuss to make Faunus Pan blush in Gwongnaamese now, but Angeal figured himself happy when he could twist his tongue enough around Chochungese to order food on his own.

Ahh, well, he figured, and gave a lopsided smile. "Did I get that right at all?" he asked, scratching the back of his head.

His fumbling horribly over the Chochungese for "goodnight" seemed to have done the trick, though--Gong-gil managed the faintest ghost of a laugh, lightening his face and making him into something breathtaking, before he nodded once and gave a nodding bow of thanks with his head.

He felt like he'd at least made some kind of progress, but that feeling quickly deflated when he realized the other man wasn't relaxing at all; that he was still tense and wary and still watching Angeal. He didn't know how Gong-gil managed it; it was like being watched by a badly-injured kitten that knew it couldn't do anything and was waiting for you to pounce and attack it.

...Like watching a wet, injured, shivering kitten, that's how helpless Gong-gil seemed, like he had no defenses at all, not even pride.

Angeal wondered about his thinking sometimes. He was sure that kitten analogy had made _some_ sort of sense when he started it, for all it was strange to be comparing a grown man--one who was actually a couple centimeters taller than the other Chochungese for all he was good at making himself look small--to a _kitten_. He could almost hear Genesis in his head again, this time going, 'You _still_ suck at analogies, Angeal.' "Just get some sleep. And I promise I won't make you ever have to listen to me try to speak Chochungese ever again."

Gong-gil let out another faint laugh, one that was tired and thin and a little surprised at itself but still an honest-to-the-gods laugh, and he clutched the cover to him and curled up underneath it. But his eyes only began to drift back shut after Angeal went back to his desk and went back to work, and Angeal began to wonder what he would have to do to convince the poor guy he didn't mean him any harm.

_...never mind you might have to see about having the guy killed_, Angeal thought sourly, his face tightening as reality sank back in. _You can't forget that. _

He looked over at Gong-gil and something in him sank. _If he was as involved with the king as it seems like he was, and if the people who helped us overthrow that madman are the ones who tried to kill Gong-gil...ShinRa won't want to let him live. _

It would have been easier, he thought, turning to stare out the window, if he'd never started trying to figure this out.

\--

_And he was falling, falling into some kind of mist-filled darkness, and scratched barely at the edge of his consciousness was a voice, a jagged, broken, woman's voice that filled him with terror, and if he fell any more into the mist that voice would crawl inside him, have him, make him into that monster again, and-- _

He jolted awake with a yell, flailing, and Gong-gil jerked his hand back quickly, his eyes wide. Angeal had no idea when he'd fallen asleep. He'd fallen asleep at his desk, face-first into his paperwork by the feel of things, and half the papers were fluttering around wildly after the flailing he'd done.

Gong-gil was still staring at him wide-eyed, and Angeal wiped at his face, trying to get rid of the jittery bad-feeling left over from it, like something that had been scratching at his brain. "Nightmare," Angeal said in answer to Gong-gil's unspoken question, rubbing his face tiredly. "Seen too much, I guess," he said, and sighed. "That was why I was out walking tonight," he said, feeling like he had to explain. And hoping Gong-gil would buy it. It _was_ the truth, after all, for all it wasn't quite the _whole_ truth. It was a truth that didn't make him uncomfortable, and that was good enough. Angeal really wasn't very good at second-guessing himself or why he did anything or ascribing deep meanings to things; he tended to leave that sort of garbage to Genesis, who seemed to love it. Angeal had no idea why; all of this was making his head hurt.

Gong-gil let out a sudden, sharp gasp.

"What?" Angeal said, tensing and looking around quickly. There was nothing that should have startled the guy...

Gong-gil was staring at his desk. Or rather, staring at the folding fan on his desk. It was the broken old fan Angeal had picked up a while back, and that even now would pick up and turn in his hands whenever he was thinking or wondering what he was doing here. Gong-gil was staring at it and looking as if he had seen a ghost or something.

"Gong-gil? What's wrong?" Angeal asked, then felt stupid because it wasn't as if the man could _tell_ him. The guy still wasn't talking, after all.

Gong-gil was completely focused on the fan and he reached for it, and his hand--his _hands_ were shaking. Angeal almost stopped him, something stupid and possessive flaring up, but that was stupid, it was a _fan_. And one that obviously meant a lot more to Gong-gil than it did to Angeal, judging by the way Gong-gil was shaking as he picked the fan up.

When he had it in his shaking hands, Gong-gil gripped it tightly and held it to his chest. He looked like he was having trouble breathing, and dropped his head. He let out a hitching breath, and Angeal stared, completely flummoxed, at Gong-gil's shaking shoulders, before he realized the man was _crying_.

"Gong-gil, what in the goddess' sweet name--?" Angeal began, rising to his feet and not knowing what under the Heavens could have set Gong-gil off as it had.

Gong-gil looked up at him, tears falling one after another from his eyes. His mouth moved soundlessly, as if he was struggling to make himself say something but nothing would come out. And then he just gave up and dropped his head again, sobbing and clutching the fan so tightly his knuckles had gone white.

Angeal had no idea what to do about this.

By now, he figured, you'd think he'd be used to that.

\--

Angeal crossed his arms and glared. He kept the glare up for a long time, and waited. He knew how well that glare could work, and he was determined to use it to full advantage today. He'd cleared his entire morning for this, after all, and was fully prepared to glare as long as this took.

Things went as he had expected. Williams went from sulking to _sweating_, and when he was a few minutes away from _shaking_, Angeal finally said something.

"Explain yourself, trooper. First off, why were you in the room with him?"

"He still has the scissors, sir," Williams said, looking at his hands. "We can't see him from outside, so we've been in the same room. It's a large room and he works in the bigger room, where the table is."

Well, that made sense, at least. As for the rest... "And what does making sure he doesn't turn a pair of scissors into a weapon have anything to do with that spectacle I saw last night?"

"Things went too far," Williams blurted out. "I wasn't going to hurt him, honest, sir! I was just..." he trailed off.

"Just _what_?"

"I was kidding around. That guy is creepy, y'know? Won't say anything. It's _creepy_."

"So you're saying you assaulted him because he's mute. Likely _trauma-induced_ muteness," he said, emphasizing the 'trauma' bit, because, sweet Shiva, he knew what things were like, but what in Hel's name...? The poor guy was _damaged_, and his guard was attacking him because he was _creepy_?

"No! Yes! No...I mean...He acts like a girl," Williams said, his shoulders slumping. "So I was...just giving him a hard time, y'know? Creepy ass wutie that won't talk and is pretty as a girl. I was just sayin' maybe he was a girl, just hiding it, and...and things just got out of hand." Williams looked up, pleadingly. "I wasn't gonna hurt the guy,_ honest_! I just...he shouldn't be so damn girly, everyone was wonderin' and talking about it, an'..."

Angeal was beginning to get used to having a headache every day.

"So what this boils down to is you wanting to strip the man naked to prove he is a man. Because he was too 'quiet' and too 'girly.' Have I got you right?" he said flatly, fixing the glare back on the man.

"Yes sir," the man said, shoulders slumping and looking pained.

"So basically...you're trying to tell me you're not a rapist, you're just a fucking idiot, is that it?" Angeal said, voice just as flat.

"I was just..."

"I don't want your excuses for a yes or no question," he said, crossing his arms again. "Which is just going to prove how much of a_ fucking idiot_ you are. I do not have time for stupid, immature STUNTS, trooper!" he yelled sharply. "Your job was to guard him, not to satisfy your boneheaded curiosity! Because you are a moron, I'm now even deeper in paperwork, you are in line for a reprimand at _best_, and the 'creepy, girly' man you were supposed to be guarding is now even less likely to get over what the docs are saying is, once again since you didn't seem to get it, _trauma-induced muteness_. Which, all in all, once again inconveniences _me_, because the pool of people who can guard him is very, very small and taking _you_ out means I very well might have to put _my translator_ in. And I've got investigating this added to the rest of my duties. How well do you think I like that, Williams?"

Williams swallowed.

"I SAID 'How well do you think I like that', Trooper!" Angeal yelled. "You WILL answer your commanding officer! How well do you think I like that?"

The man had gone ramrod straight at Angeal's drill sergeant tone in yelling, and his response was just as drill-like in cadence and volume. "I don't think you like it, sir!"

"You're fucking right I don't!" Angeal yelled. "And as for you, you immature ass, depending on the statement I get from your little prank victim, you will either be reprimanded or discharged...or sent so deep into the swamps that the Great Forest looks like a public park! So you better pray he backs up your 'Ha ha, just a joke that got out of hand' version of events," he said, feeling disgusted, but relieved at the same time, because true or not, he _really_ wanted to believe it was just a situation that got out of hand. It was reasonable, it was plausible, and it was _better than the alternative by a lot_. He knew what the alternative was--he'd fucking _seen_ the alternative, because it was fucking _war_, and no matter what orders and regulations on treatment of 'the enemy,' when people got caught up in us vs. them and 'the enemy is not like us,' honor and civilization went out the fucking window, especially when the upper echelons turned a blind eye.

Angeal was not so naïve as to think all the half-Eastern children in Wutai were the children of wives and whores.

Not with everything he'd seen.

He'd seen enough, before he was given rank enough to put a stop to some abuses, that it had been a _long_ time since he'd had untroubled sleep. It seemed like the only thing keeping him sane, or that _had_ kept him sane, was his sense of right and wrong--and ShinRa be _damned_, pressure from everyone around him be _damned_, he'd hold on to that. As much as he _could_, at any rate, because while he never drew his sword, would _never_ draw his sword for the things done here, he'd gotten far too good at using a _gun_ after the fall of Daerimmun. Things he still did--he knew sooner rather than later, Jang Nok-su would become another "died in the Fall of Daerimmun," too.

He shook his head to clear it, bring him back to the present, to not think that out any further. He was going to take Williams on face value, that that was all it had been. He needed for that to have been all that it was--as stupid as it was, he _needed_ to believe it. So much of his faith in other people had been whittled away in Chochung, that he needed to believe people weren't as bad as they seemed sometimes. Williams didn't seem like he was lying, and by the gods, Angeal didn't want to think that he was. "I have better things to be doing with my time," he muttered.

"I'm sorry, sir," Williams said, looking at his hands. "It was a mistake. Honest, I _wasn't_ going to hurt the guy. It was a mistake."

"That's for damned sure," Angeal said. "Take him back to his cell and get him out of my face," he said to the guard.

\--

"I apologize for my mistake, sir," Park said, and Angeal just blinked at him.

"Huh?" he said, feeling stupid and having no idea why Park had just burst out with an apology. He'd had a long day, starting bright and early with questioning Williams, and it had pretty much been all downhill from there. He needed more sleep than he was getting and he knew it, but it wasn't happening. Most nights he counted himself lucky if he went to sleep before 2 am, and considering he was up at 6, that wasn't cutting it anymore.

"I was in charge of guard selection. I take responsibility for the occurrence with Williams."

Angeal shook his head. "It's not your fault a bad apple slipped through," he said, waving his hand dismissively. "Anyone who saw that coming from his files has a bright future as an _oracle_."

Park seemed to accept this--if nothing else, something slight seemed to relax, as if he had been on edge, waiting to see how Angeal responded, and Angeal wrote that off as insane. Park didn't _do_ that kind of thing, and it would be odd if Park wanted _Angeal's_ approval. Or, he thought, he had been worried about a reprimand of some sort, and that made sense. Park's record was sterling, probably because he had to work twice as hard, Angeal knew, as anyone else to prove he wasn't Chochungese _first_. It wasn't fair and it wasn't right, but that's how the world worked and he knew it, and people would use anything they could against someone Wutai.

"What are you going to do for his second night shift, sir?" Park asked. "The shift that Williams was one? There are one or two people who have some Chochungese I selected as reserve guards..."

  Angeal groaned. "Fuck. At this point, I don't trust _anyone_ any more." He sighed, then threw his hands in the air. "Screw this. Shift the first guy to second, and I'll take first shift for now. If he needs anything I'm about the only person with the authority to drag your ass out of bed to come translate it. And it's not like I'm sleeping anyway," he muttered under his breath, shutting his eyes and rubbing the bridge of his nose. If he wasn't going to get to sleep before 2 am anyway, he figured he might was well do something more productive than staring at the ceiling over his bed. This couldn't be more than a temporary solution, but fuck. He was so tired of all of this, of everything being crazy, and by the _gods_, he was going to do something right--he wasn't going to let anyone else be abused or die who didn't have to. And if that meant watching Gong-gil himself, so be it.

"Sir..."

"_Dismissed_, lieutenant," Angeal said, not opening his eyes or wanting to deal with whatever Park might have been about to say.

Park's "Yes, sir" was much longer in coming than it normally was, and Park hesitated for a split second at the door before he walked out.


End file.
